GOD  AND  MR.  WELLS 
WILLIAM  ARCHER 


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GOD  AND  MR.  WELLS 

A  CRITICAL  EXAMINATION  OF 
"GOD  THE   INVISIBLE  KING" 


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GOD  AND  MR.  WELLS 

A  CRITICAL  EXAMINATION  OF 
"GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING" 

By    WILLIAM    ARCHER 


NEW  YORK  /  ALFRED  A.  KNOPF 


COPYRIGHT,  1917,  BY 
ALFRED  A.  KNOPF 

Published,  September,  1917 
Second  Printing,  September,  1917 


PRINTED    IN    THE    UNITED   STATES   OF    AMERICA 


FOREWORD 

As  I  look  through  the  proofs  of  this  little 
treatise,  a  twinge  of  compunction  comes  upon  me. 
That  humane  philosopher  Mr.  Dooley  has  some- 
where a  saying  to  this  effect:  "When  an  astrono- 
mer tells  me  that  he  has  discovered  a  new  planet, 
I  would  be  the  last  man  to  brush  the  fly  off  the 
end  of  his  telescope."  Would  not  this  have  been 
a  good  occasion  for  a  similar  exercise  of  urbanity? 
Nay,  may  it  not  be  said  that  my  criticism  of  God 
the  Invisible  King  is  a  breach  of  discipline,  like 
duelling  in  the  face  of  the  enemy?  I  am  proud 
to  think  that  Mr.  Wells  and  I  are  soldiers  in  the 
same  army;  ought  we  not  at  all  costs  to  maintain 
a  united  front?  On  the  destructive  side  (which  I 
have  barely  touched  upon)  his  book  is  brilliantly 
effective ;  on  the  constructive  side,  if  unconvincing, 
it  is  thoughtful,  imaginative,  stimulating,  a  thing 
on  the  whole  to  be  grateful  for.  Ought  one  not 
rather  to  hold  one's  peace  than  to  afford  the  com- 
mon enemy  the  encouragement  of  witnessing  a 
squabble  in  the  ranks? 


vi  FOREWORD 


But  we  must  not  yield  to  the  obsession  of  mili- 
tary metaphor.  It  is  not  what  the  enemy  thinks 
or  what  Mr.  Wells  or  I  think  that  matters — it  is 
what  the  men  of  the  future  ought  to  think,  as  being 
consonant  with  their  own  nature  and  with  the 
nature  of  things.  Ideas,  like  organisms,  must 
abide  the  struggle  for  existence,  and  if  the  Invisi- 
ble King  is  fitted  to  survive,  my  criticism  will  rein- 
force and  not  invalidate  him.  Even  if  he  should 
come  to  life  in  a  way  one  can  scarcely  anticipate, 
his  proceedings  will  have  to  be  carefully  watched. 
He  cannot  claim  the  reticences  of  a  "party  truce." 
He  will  be  all  the  better  for  a  candid,  though  I 
hope  not  captious,  Opposition. 

I  thought  of  printing  on  my  title-page  a  motto 
from  Mr.  Bernard  Shaw;  but  it  will  perhaps  come 
better  here.  "The  fact,"  says  Mr.  Shaw,  "that  a 
believer  is  happier  than  a  sceptic  is  no  more  to 
the  point  than  the  fact  that  a  drunken  man  is 
happier  than  a  sober  one.  The  happiness  of 
credulity  is  a  cheap  and  dangerous  quality  of 
happiness,  and  by  no  means  a  necessity  of  life. 
Whether  Socrates  got  as  much  happiness  out  of 
life  as  Wesley  is  an  unanswerable  question;  but  a 
nation  of  Socrateses  would  be  much  safer  and 
happier  than  a  nation  of  Wesleys;  and  its  indi- 


FOREWORD  vii 


viduals  would  be  higher  in  the  evolutionary  scale. 
At  all  events,  it  is  in  the  Socratic  man  and  not  in 
the  Wesleyan  that  our  hope  lies  now." 

Besides,  it  has  yet  to  be  proved  that  the  believer 
in  the  Invisible  King  is  happier  than  the  sceptic. 

LONDON,  May  24,  1917. 


CONTENTS 

I  The  Great  Adventurer  1 

II  A  God  Who  "Growed"  3 

III  New  Myths  for  Old  8 

IV  The  Apostle's  Creed  32 

V  When  Is  a  God  Not  a  God?  47 

VI  For  and  Against  Personification  73 

VII  Back  to  the  Veiled  Being  101 


GOD  AND  MR.  WELLS 


THE   GREAT   ADVENTURER 

WHEN  it  was  known  that  Mr.  H.  G. 
Wells  had  set  forth  to  discover  God, 
all  amateurs  of  intellectual  adventure 
were  filled  with  pleasurable  excitement  and  antici- 
pation. For  is  not  Mr.  Wells  the  great  Adventurer 
of  latter-day  literature?  No  quest  is  too  perilous 
for  him,  no  forlorn-hope  too  daring.  He  led  the 
first  explorers  to  the  moon.  He  it  was  who  lured 
the  Martians  to  earth  and  exterminated  them  with 
microbes.  He  has  ensnared  an  angel  from  the 
skies  and  expiscated  a  mermaid  from  the  deep. 
He  has  mounted  a  Time  Machine  (of  his  own 
invention)  and  gone  careering  down  the  vistas  of 
the  Future.  But  these  were  comparatively  com- 
monplace feats.  After  all,  there  had  been  a  Jules 
Verne,  there  had  been  a  Gulliver  and  a  Peter 

Wilkins,  there  had  been  a  More,  a  Morris  and  a 

l 


GOD  AND  MR.  WELLS 


Bellamy.  It  might  be  that  he  was  fitted  for  far 
greater  things.  "There  remains,"  we  said  to  our- 
selves, "the  blue  ribbon  of  intellectual  adventure, 
the  unachieved  North  Pole  of  spiritual  explora- 
tion. He  has  had  countless  predecessors  in  the 
enterprise,  some  of  whom  have  loudly  claimed 
success;  but  their  log-books  have  been  full  of  mere 
hallucinations  and  nursery  tales.  What  if  it 
should  be  reserved  for  Mr.  Wells  to  bring  back  the 
first  authentic  news  from  a  source  more  baffling 
than  that  of  Nile  or  Amazon — the  source  of  the 
majestic  stream  of  Being?  What  if  it  should  be 
given  him  to  sign  his  name  to  the  first  truly- 
projected  chart  of  the  scheme  of  things?" 

We  almost  held  our  breath  in  eager  anticipation, 
just  as  we  did  when  there  came  from  America  a 
well-authenticated  rumor  that  the  problem  of  fly- 
ing had  at  last  been  solved.  Were  we  on  the  brink 
of  another  and  much  more  momentous  discovery? 
Was  Mr.  Wells  to  be  the  Peary  of  the  great  quest? 
Or  only  the  last  of  a  thousand  Dr.  Cooks? 


II 

A  GOD  WHO  "CROWED" 

OUR   excitement,    our   suspense,    were   so 
much  wasted  emotion.     Mr.  Wells's  en- 
terprise was  not  at  all  what  we  had  fig- 
ured it  to  be. 

GOD 

THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

is  a  very  interesting,  and  even  stimulating  dis- 
quisition, full  of  a  fine  social  enthusiasm,  and 
marked,  in  many  passages,  by  deep  poetic  feeling. 
But  it  is  not  a  work  of  investigation  into  the  springs 
of  Being.  Mr.  Wells  explicitly  renounces  from 
the  outset  any  dealings  with  "cosmogony."  It  is 
a  description  of  a  way  of  thinking,  a  system  of 
nomenclature,  which  Mr.  Wells  declares  to  be  ex- 
tremely prevalent  in  "the  modern  mind,"  from 
which  he  himself  extracts  much  comfort  and  forti- 
fication, and  which  he  believes  to  be  destined  to 
regenerate  the  world. 


4 GOD  AND  MR.  WELLS 

But  Mr.  Wells  will  not  have  it  that  what  is  in- 
volved is  a  mere  system  of  nomenclature.  He 
avers  that  he,  in  common  with  many  other  like- 
minded  persons,  has  achieved,  not  so  much  an  in- 
tellectual discovery  as  an  emotional  realisation,  of 
something  actual  and  objective  which  he  calls  God. 
He  does  not,  so  far  as  I  remember,  use  the  term 
"objective";  but  as  he  insists  that  God  is  "a  spirit, 
a  person,  a  strongly  marked  and  knowable  person- 
ality" (p.  5),  "a  single  spirit  and  a  single  person" 
(p.  18),  "a  great  brother  and  leader  of  our  little 
beings"  (p.  24)  with  much  more  to  the  same  pur- 
pose, it  would  seem  that  he  must  have  in  his  mind 
an  object  external  to  us,  no  mere  subjective 
"stream  of  tendency,"  or  anything  of  that  sort. 
It  would  of  course  be  foolish  to  doubt  the  sin- 
cerity of  the  conviction  which  he  so  constantly  and 
so  eagerly  asserts.  Nevertheless,  one  cannot  but 
put  forward,  even  at  this  stage,  the  tentative  theory 
that  he  is  playing  tricks  with  his  own  mind,  and 
attributing  reality  and  personality  to  something 
that  was  in  its  origin  a  figure  of  speech.  He  has 
been  hypnotized  by  the  word  God: 

As  when  we  dwell  upon  a  word  we  know, 
Repeating,  till  the  word  we  know  so  well 
Becomes  a  wonder,  and  we  know  not  why. 


A  GOD  WHO  "CROWED' 


At  all  events,  "God  the  Invisible  King"  is  not 
the  creator  and  sustainer  of  the  universe.  As  to 
the  origin  of  things  Mr.  Wells  professes  the  most 
profound  agnosticism.  "At  the  back  of  all  known 
things,"  he  says,  "there  is  an  impenetrable  cur- 
tain; the  ultimate  of  existence  is  a  Veiled  Being, 
which  seems  to  know  nothing  of  life  or  death  or 
good  or  ill.  .  .  .  The  new  religion  does  not  pre- 
tend that  the  God  of  its  life  is  that  Being,  or  that  he 
has  any  relation  of  control  or  association  with  that 
Being.  It  does  not  even  assert  that  God  knows  all, 
or  much  more  than  we  do,  about  that  ultimate 
Being"  (p.  14).  Very  good;  but — here  is  the  first 
question  which  seems  to  arise  out  of  the  Wellsian 
thesis — are  we  not  entitled  to  ask  of  "the  new 
religion"  some  more  definite  account  of  the  rela- 
tion between  "God"  and  "the  Veiled  Being"? 
Surely  it  is  not  enough  that  it  should  simply  re- 
frain from  "asserting"  anything  at  all  on  the  sub- 
ject. If  "God"  is  outside  ourselves  ("a  Being,  not 
us  but  dealing  with  us  and  through  us,"  p.  6)  we 
cannot  leave  him  hanging  in  the  void,  like  the  rope 
which  the  Indian  conjurer  is  fabled  to  throw  up 
into  the  air  till  it  hooks  itself  on  to  nothingness. 
If  we  are  to  believe  in  him  as  a  lever  for  the  right- 
ing of  a  world  that  has  somehow  run  askew,  we 


GOD  AND  MR.  WELLS 


want  to  know  something  of  his  fulcrum.  Is  it  pos- 
sible thus  to  dissociate  him  from  the  Veiled  Being, 
and  proclaim  him  an  independent,  an  agnostic 
God?  Do  we  really  get  over  any  difficulty — do  we 
not  rather  create  new  difficulties, — by  saying,  as 
Mr.  Wells  practically  does,  "Our  God  is  no  meta- 
physician. He  does  not  care,  and  very  likely  does 
not  know,  how  this  tangle  of  existence  came  into 
being.  He  is  only  concerned  to  disentangle  it  a 
little,  to  reduce  the  chaos  of  the  world  to  some  sort 
of  seemliness  and  order"?  Is  it  an  idle  and  pre- 
sumptuous curiosity  which  enquires  whether  we  are 
to  consider  him  co-ordinate  with  the  Veiled  Being, 
and  in  that  case  probably  hostile,  or  subordinate, 
and  in  that  case  instrumental?  Are  we,  in  a  word, 
to  consider  the  earth  a  little  rebel  state  in  the 
gigantic  empire  of  the  universe,  working  out  its 
own  salvation  under  its  Invisible  King?  Or  are 
we  to  regard  God  as  the  Viceroy  of  the  Veiled 
Being,  to  whom,  in  that  case,  our  ultimate  alle- 
giance is  due? 

I  talked  the  other  day  to  a  young  Australian 
who  had  been  breaking  new  land  for  wheat- 
growing.  "What  do  you  do?"  I  asked,  "with  the 
stumps  of  the  trees  you  fell?  It  must  be  a  great 
labour  to  clear  them  out."  "We  don't  clear  them 


A  GOD  WHO  "CROWED' 


out,"  he  replied.  "We  use  ploughs  that  auto- 
matically rise  when  they  come  to  a  stump,  and  take 
the  earth  again  on  the  other  side."  I  cannot  but 
conjecture  that  Mr.  Wells's  thinking  apparatus  is 
fitted  with  some  such  automatic  appliance  for  soar- 
ing gaily  over  the  snags  that  stud  the  ploughlands 
of  theology. 


Ill 

NEW  MYTHS   FOR  OLD 

BEFORE  examining  the  particular  attributes 
and  activities  of  the  Invisible  King,  let  us 
look  a  little  more  closely  into  the  question 
whether  a  God  detached  alike  from  man  below  and 
(so  to  speak)  from  heaven  above,  is  a  thinkable 
God  in  whom  any  satisfaction  can  be  found.  Mr. 
Wells  must  not  reply  (he  probably  would  not  think 
of  doing  so)  that  "satisfaction"  is  no  test:  that  he 
asserts  an  objective  truth  which  exists,  like  the 
Nelson  Column  or  the  Atlantic  Ocean,  whether  we 
find  satisfaction  in  it  or  not.  Though  he  does  not 
mention  the  word  "pragmatism,"  his  standards  are 
purely  pragmatist.  He  offers  no  jot  or  tittle  of 
evidence  for  the  existence  of  the  Invisible  King, 
except  that  it  is  a  hypothesis  which  he  finds  to 
work  extremely  well.  Satisfaction  and  nothing 
else  is  the  test  he  applies.  So  we  have  every  right 
to  ask  whether  the  renunciation  of  all  concern 
about  the  Veiled  Being,  and  concentration  upon  the 
thought  of  a  finite  God,  practically  unrelated  to 


NEW  MYTHS  FOR  OLD 


the  infinite,  can  bring  us  any  reasonable  sense  of 
reconciliation  to  the  nature  of  things.  For  that, 
I  take  it,  is  the  essence  of  religion. 

It  was  in  no  spirit  of  irony  that  I  began  this 
essay  by  expressing  the  lively  interest  with  which 
I  learned  that  Mr.  Wells  was  setting  out  on  the 
quest  for  God.  The  dogmatic  agnosticism  which 
declares  it  impossible  ever  to  know  anything  about 
the  whence,  how  and  why  of  the  universe  does  not 
seem  to  me  more  rational  than  any  other  dogma 
which  jumps  from  "not  yet"  to  "never."  Mr. 
Wells  himself  disclaims  that  dogma.  He  says:  "It 
may  be  that  minds  will  presently  appear  among 
us  of  such  a  quality  that  the  face  of  that  Unknown 
will  not  be  altogether  hidden"  (p.  108).  And  in 
another  place  (p.  15)  he  suggests  that  "our  God, 
the  Captain  of  Mankind,"  may  one  day  enable  us 
to  "pierce  the  black  wrappings,"  or,  in  other 
words,  to  get  behind  the  veil.  There  is  nothing, 
then,  unreasonable  or  absurd  in  man's  incurable 
inquisitiveness  as  to  God,  in  the  non-Wellsian  sense 
of  the  term.  God  simply  means  the  key  to  the 
mystery  of  existence;  and  though  the  keys  hitherto 
offered  have  all  either  jammed  or  turned  round 
and  round  without  unlocking  anything,  it  does  not 
follow  that  no  real  key  exists  within  the  reach  of 


10 GOD  AND  MR.  WELLS 

human  investigation  or  speculation.  Therefore 
one  naturally  feels  a  little  stirring  of  hope  at  the 
news  that  a  fresh  and  keen  intellect,  untrammelled 
by  the  folk-lore  theologies  of  the  past,  is  applying 
itself  to  the  problem.  It  is  always  possible,  how- 
ever improbable,  that  we  may  be  helped  a  little 
forwarder  on  the  path  towards  realization.  One 
comes  back  to  the  before-mentioned  analogy  of 
flying.  We  had  been  assured  over  and  over  again, 
on  the  highest  authority,  that  it  was  an  idle  dream. 
When  we  wanted  to  express  the  superlative  degree 
of  the  impossible,  we  said  "I  can  no  more  do  it 
than  I  can  fly."  But  the  irrepressible  spirit  of 
man  was  not  to  be  daunted  by  a  priori  demonstra- 
tions of  impossibility.  One  day  there  came  the 
rumour  that  the  thing  had  been  achieved,  followed 
soon  by  ocular  demonstration;  and  now  we  rub 
shoulders  every  day  with  men  who  have  outsoared 
the  eagle,  and — alas! — carried  death  and  destruc- 
tion into  the  hitherto  stainless  empyrean. 

It  would  seem,  then,  that  there  is  no  reason 
absolutely  to  despair  of  some  advance  towards  a 
conception  of  the  nature  and  reason  of  the  uni- 
verse. And  it  is  certain  that  Mr.  Wells's  God 
would  stand  a  better  chance  of  satisfying  the  innate 
needs  of  the  human  intelligence  if  he  had  not 


NEW  MYTHS  FOR  OLD 11 

(apparently)  given  up  as  a  bad  job  the  attempt 
to  relate  himself  to  the  causal  plexus  of  the  All. 
Is  he  outside  that  causal  plexus,  self -begotten,  self- 
existent?  Then  he  is  the  miracle  of  miracles,  a 
second  mystery  superimposed  on  the  first.  If,  on 
the  other  hand,  he  falls  within  the  system,  he 
might  surely  manage  to  convey  to  his  disciples 
some  glimmering  notion  of  his  place  in  it.  The 
birth-stories  of  Gods  are  always  grotesque  and  un- 
edifying,  but  that  is  because  they  belong  to  folk- 
lore. If  this  God  does  not  belong  to  folk-lore, 
surely  his  relation  to  the  Veiled  Being  might  be 
indicated  without  impropriety.  Mr.  Wells,  as  we 
have  seen,  hints  that  his  reticence  may  be  due  to 
the  fact  that  he  does  not  know.  In  that  case  this 
"modern"  God  is  suspiciously  like  all  the  ancient 
Gods,  whose  most  unfortunate  characteristic  was 
that  they  never  knew  anything  more  than  their 
worshippers.  The  reason  was  not  far  to  seek — 
namely,  that  they  were  mere  projections  of  the 
minds  of  these  worshippers,  fashioned  in  their  own 
image.  But  Mr.  Wells  assures  us  that  this  is  not 
the  case  of  the  Invisible  King. 

Mr.  Wells  will  scarcely  deny  that  if  it  were  pos- 
sible to  compress  his  mythology  and  merge  his 
Invisible  King  in  his  Veiled  Being,  the  result  would 


12 GOD  AND  MR.  WELLS 

be  a  great  simplification  of  the  problem.  But  this 
is  not,  in  fact,  possible;  for  it  would  mean  the 
positing  of  an  all-good  and  all-powerful  Creator, 
which  is  precisely  the  idea  which  Mr.  Wells  rebels 
against,1  in  common  with  every  one  who  realizes 
the  facts  of  life  and  the  meaning  of  words.  Short 
of  this,  however,  is  no  other  simplification  pos- 
sible? Would  it  not  greatly  clarify  our  thought 
if  we  could  bring  the  Invisible  King  into  action, 
not,  indeed,  as  the  creator  of  all  things,  but  as  the 
organizer  and  director  of  the  surprising  and  almost 
incredible  epiphenomenon  which  we  call  life? 
Our  scheme  would  then  take  this  shape:  an  incon- 
ceivable unity  behind  the  veil,  somehow  manifest- 
ing itself,  where  it  comes  within  our  ken,  in  the 
dual  form  of  a  great  Artificer  and  a  mass  of  terri- 
bly recalcitrant  matter — the  only  medium  in  which 
he  can  work.  In  other  words,  the  Veiled  Being 

i  In  Mr.  BritKng  Sees  It  Through,  which  is  in  some  sense  a 
prologue  to  God  the  Invisible  King,  we  find  an  emphatic  re- 
nunciation of  the  all-good  and  all-powerful  God.  "The 
theologians,"  says  Mr.  Britling,  "have  been  extravagant  about 
God.  They  have  had  silly,  absolute  ideas — that  he  is  all 
powerful.  That  he's  omni-everything.  .  .  .  Why!  if  I  thought 
there  was  an  omnipotent  God  who  looked  down  on  battles  and 
deaths  and  all  the  waste  and  horror  of  this  war — able  to 
prevent  these  things — doing  them  to  amuse  himself — I  would 
spit  in  his  empty  face"  (p.  406). 


NEW  MYTHS  FOR  OLD  13 

would  be  as  inscrutable  as  ever,  but  the  Invisible 
King,  instead  of  dropping  in  with  a  certain  air  of 
futility,  like  a  doctor  arriving  too  late  at  the  scene 
of  a  railway  accident,  would  be  placed  at  the  begin- 
ning, not  of  the  universe  at  large,  but  of  the  atomic 
re-arrangements  from  which  consciousness  has 
sprung.  Can  we,  on  this  hypothesis  (which  is 
practically  that  of  Manichaeanism)  hazard  any 
guess  at  the  motives  or  forces  actuating  the  Invisi- 
ble King, — or,  to  avoid  confusion,  let  us  say  the 
Artificer — which  should  acquit  him  of  the  charge 
of  being  a  callous  and  mischievous  demon  rather 
than  a  well-willing  God?  Can  we  not  only  place 
pain  and  evil  (a  tautology)  to  the  account  of 
sluggish,  refractory  matter,  but  also  conjecture  a 
sufficient  reason  why  the  Artificer  should  have 
started  the  painful  evolution  of  consciousness,  in- 
stead of  leaving  the  atoms  to  whirl  insentiently  in 
the  figures  imposed  on  them  by  the  stupendous 
mathematician  behind  the  veil? 

A  complete  answer  to  this  question  would  be  a 
complete  solution  of  the  riddle  of  existence.  That, 
if  it  be  ever  attainable,  is  certainly  far  enough  off. 
But  there  are  some  considerations,  not  always 
sufficiently  present  to  our  minds,  which  may  per- 


14 GOD  AND  MR.  WELLS 

haps  help  us,  not  to  a  solution,  but  to  a  rational 
restatement,  of  the  riddle. 

It  is  possible  to  suppose,  in  the  first  place,  that 
the  Artificer,  though  entirely  well-meaning,  was 
not  a  free  agent.  We  can  construct  a  myth  in 
which  an  Elder  Power  should  announce  to  a 
Younger  Power  his  intention  of  setting  a  number 
of  sentient  puppets  dancing  for  his  amusement,  and 
regaling  himself  with  the  spectacle  of  their  antics, 
in  utter  heedlessness  of  the  agonies  they  must  en- 
dure, which  would,  indeed,  lend  an  additional 
savor  to  the  diversion.  This  Elder  Power,  with 
the  "sportsman's"  preference  for  pigeons  as  against 
clay  balls,  would  be  something  like  the  God  of 
Mr.  Thomas  Hardy.  Then  we  can  imagine  the 
Younger  Power,  after  a  vain  protest  demanding,  as 
it  were,  the  vice-royalty  of  the  new  kingdom,  in 
order  that  he  might  shape  its  polity  to  high  and 
noble  ends,  educe  from  tragic  imperfection  some 
approach  to  perfection,  and,  in  short,  make  the  best 
of  a  bad  business.  We  should  thus  have  (let  us 
say)  Marcus  Aurelius  claiming  a  proconsulate  un- 
der Nero,  and,  with  very  limited  powers,  gradually 
substituting  order  and  humanity  for  oppression 
and  rapine.  This  fairy-tale  is  not  unlike  Mr. 
Wells's;  but  I  submit  that  it  has  the  advantage  of 


NEW  MYTHS  FOR  OLD 15 

placing  the  Invisible  King,  or  his  equivalent,  in  a 
conceivable  relation  to  the  whole  mundane  process. 

Now  let  us  proceed  to  the  alternative  hypothesis. 
Let  us  suppose  that  the  Artificer  was  a  free  agent, 
and  that  he  voluntarily,  and  in  full  view  of  the 
consequences,  engineered  the  conjunction  of  atoms 
from  which  consciousness  arose.  He  could  have 
let  it  alone,  he  could  have  suffered  life  to  remain 
an  abortive,  slumbering  potentiality,  like  the  fire 
in  a  piece  of  flint;  yet  he  deliberately  clashed  the 
flint  and  steel  and  kindled  the  torch  which  was  to 
be  handed  on,  not  only  from  generation  to  genera- 
tion, but  from  species  to  species,  through  all  the 
stages  of  a  toilsome,  slaughterous,  immeasurable 
ascent.  If  we  accept  this  hypothesis,  can  we  acquit 
the  Artificer  of  wanton  cruelty?  Can  we  view  his 
action  with  approval,  even  with  gratitude?  Or 
must  we,  like  Mr.  Wells,  if  we  wish  to  find  an 
outlet  for  religious  emotion,  postulate  another,  sub- 
sequent, intermeddling  Power — like,  say,  an  Amer- 
ican consul  at  the  scene  of  the  Turkish  massacre — 
wholly  guiltless  of  the  disaster  of  life,  and  doing 
his  little  best  to  mitigate  and  remedy  it? 

In  the  present  state  of  our  knowledge,  it  is 
certainly  very  difficult  to  see  how  the  kindler  of  the 
vitai  lampada,  supposing  him  to  have  been  respon- 


16  GOD  AND  MR.  WELLS 

sible  for  his  actions,  can  claim  from  a  jury  of 
human  beings  a  verdict  of  absolute  acquittal.  But 
we  can,  even  now,  see  certain  extenuating  circum- 
stances, which  evidence  not  yet  available  may 
one  day  so  powerfully  reinforce  as  to  enable  him  to 
leave  the  Court  without  a  stain  on  his  character. 

For  one  thing,  we  are  too  much  impressed  and 
oppressed  by  the  ideas  of  magnitude  and  multi- 
tude. Since  we  have  realized  the  unspeakable  in- 
significance of  the  earth  in  relation  to  the  unimag- 
inable vastness  of  star-sown  space,  we  have  come  to 
feel  such  a  disproportion  between  the  mechanism 
of  life  and  its  upshot,  as  known  in  our  own  experi- 
ence, that  we  have  a  vague  sense  of  maleficence,  or 
at  any  rate  of  brutal  carelessness,  in  the  responsible 
Power,  whoever  that  may  be.  "What  is  it  all,"  we 
say,  "but  a  trouble  of  ants  in  the  gleam  of  a  million 
million  of  suns?"  We  feel  like  insects  whom  the 
foot  of  a  heedless  giant  may  at  any  moment  crush. 
We  dream  of  the  swish  of  a  comet's  tail  wiping  out 
organic  life  on  the  planet,  and  we  see,  as  a  matter 
of  fact,  great  natural  convulsions,  such  as  the  earth- 
quake of  Lisbon  or  the  eruption  of  Mont  Pelee, 
treating  human  communities  just  as  an  elephant 
might  treat  an  ant-hill.  It  is  this  sense  of  the  im- 
measurable disproportion  in  things  that  a  pessi- 


NEW  MYTHS  FOR  OLD 17 

mist  poet  has  expressed  in  the  well-known  son- 
net:— 

Know  you,  my   friend,  the  sudden  ecstasy 
Of  thought  that  time  and  space  annihilates, 
Creation  in  a  moment  uncreates, 

And  whirls  the  mind,  from  secular  habit  free, 

Beyond  the  spheres,  beyond  infinity, 

Beyond  the  empery  of  the  eternal  Fates, 
To  where  the  Inconceivable  ruminates, 

The  unthinkable  "To  be  or  not  to  be?" 

Then,  as  Existence  flickers  into  sight, 

A  marsh-flame  in  the  night  of  Nothingness — 

The  great,  soft,  restful,  dreamless,  fathomless  night — 

We  know  the  Affirmative  the  primal  curse, 

And  loathe,  with  all  its  imbecile  strain  and  stress, 

This  ostentatious,  vulgar  Universe. 

The  mood  here  recorded  is  one  that  must  be 
familiar  to  most  thinking  people.  "The  undevout 
astronomer  is  mad,"  said  eighteenth-century  deism: 
to-day  we  are  more  apt  to  think  that  the  uncritical 
astronomer  is  dense.  There  is  a  sort  of  colossal 
stupidity  about  the  stars  in  their  courses  that  over- 
powers and  disquiets  us.  If  (as  Alfred  Russel 
Wallace  has  argued)  the  geocentric  theory  was  not 
so  far  out  after  all,  and  the  earth,  holding  a  spe- 
cially favored  place  in  the  universe,  is  the  only 
home  of  life,  then  the  disproportion  of  mechanism 
to  result  seems  absolutely  appalling.  If,  on  the 
other  hand,  all  the  million  million  of  suns  are 


18  GOD  AND  MR.  WELLS 

pouring  out  vital  heat  to  a  like  number  of  inhabited 
planetary  systems,  the  sheer  quantity  of  life,  of 
struggle,  of  suffering  implied,  seems  a  thought  at 
which  to  shudder.  We  are  inclined  to  say  to  the 
inventor  of  sentience:  "Since  this  ingenious  com- 
bination of  yours  was  at  best  such  a  questionable 
boon,  surely  you  might  have  been  content  with  one 
experiment." 

But  all  such  criticism  rests  upon  a  fallacy,  or 
rather  a  brace  of  interrelated  fallacies.  There  can 
be  no  disproportion  between  consciousness  and  the 
unconscious,  because  they  are  absolutely  incom- 
mensurable; and  number,  in  relation  to  conscious- 
ness, is  an  illusion.  Consciousness,  wherever  it 
exists,  is  single,  indivisible,  inextensible;  and  other 
consciousnesses,  and  the  whole  external  universe, 
are,  to  the  individual  percipient,  but  shapes  in  a 
more  or  less  protracted  dream. 

Why  should  we  trouble  about  vasmess — mere 
extension  in  space?  There  is  a  sense  in  which  the 
infinitesimally  small  is  more  marvellous,  more  dis- 
quieting, than  the  infinitely  great.  The  ant,  the 
flea,  nay,  the  phagocyte  in  our  blood,  is  really  a 
more  startling  phenomenon  than  all  the  mechanics 
and  chemistry  of  the  heavens.  In  worrying  about 
the  bigness  and  the  littleness  of  things,  we  are 


NEW  MYTHS  FOR  OLD 19 

making  the  human  body  our  standard — the  body 
whose  dimensions  are  no  doubt  determined  by  con- 
venience in  relation  to  terrestrial  conditions,  but 
have  otherwise  no  sort  of  sanctity  or  superiority, 
Tightness  or  fitness.  It  happens  to  be  the  object  to 
which  is  attached  the  highest  form  of  consciousness 
we  know;  but  consciousness  itself  has  neither  parts 
nor  magnitude.  And  consciousness  itself  is  essen- 
tially greater  than  the  very  vastness  which  appals 
us,  seeing  that  it  embraces  and  envelops  it.  Enor- 
mous depths  of  space  are  pictured  in  my  brain, 
through  my  optic  nerve;  and  what  eludes  the  magic 
mirror  of  my  retina,  my  mind  can  conceive,  appre- 
hend, make  its  own.  It  is  not  even  true  to  say  that 
the  mind  cannot  conceive  infinity — the  real  truth 
(if  I  may  for  once  be  Chestertonian),  the  real 
truth  is  that  it  can  conceive  nothing  else.  "When 
Berkeley  said  there  was  no  matter" — it  mattered 
greatly  what  he  said.  Nothing  can  be  more 
certain  than  that,  apart  from  percipience,  there 
is  no  matter  that  matters.  From  the  point  of 
view  of  pantheism  (the  only  logical  theism)  God, 
far  from  being  a  Veiled  Being,  or  an  Invisible 
King,  is  precisely  the  mind  which  translates  it- 
self into  the  visible,  sensible  universe,  and  im- 
presses itself,  in  the  form  of  a  never-ending  pag- 


20 GOD  AND  MR.  WELLS 

eant,  upon  our  cognate  minds.  It  has  been  thought 
that  human  consciousness  may  have  come  into  being 
because  God  wanted  an  audience.  He  was  tired  of 
being  a  cinematograph-film  unreeling  before  empty 
benches.  Some  people  have  even  carried  the  spec- 
ulation further,  and  wondered  whether  the  attach- 
ment of  percipience  to  organized  matter,  as  in  the 
case  of  human  beings,  may  not  be  a  necessary  stage 
in  the  culture  of  a  pure  percipience,  capable  of  fur- 
nishing the  pageant  of  the  universe  with  a  perma- 
nent and  appreciative  audience.  In  that  case  the 
Scottish  Catechism  would  be  justified,  which  asks 
"What  is  the  chief  end  of  man?"  and  answers  (as 
Stevenson  says)  nobly  if  obscurely:  "To  glorify 
God  and  to  enjoy  Him  forever."  But  enough  of 
these  idle  fantasies.  What  is  certain  is  that  we  can 
hold  up  our  heads  serenely  among  the  immensities, 
knowing  that  we  are  immenser  than  they.  Even  if 
they  were  malevolent — and  that  they  do  not  seem 
to  be — they  are  no  more  terrible  than  the  familiar 
dangers  of  our  homely  earth.  They  cannot  hurt  us 
more  than  we  can  be  hurt — an  obvious  truism  but 
one  which  is  often  overlooked.  And  this  brings  us 
to  the  consideration  of  the  second  fallacy  which 
sometimes  warps  our  judgment  as  to  the  responsi- 
bility of  the  Power  which  invented  life. 


NEW  MYTHS  FOR  OLD 21 

We  are  all  apt  to  speak  and  think  as  though 
Sentience  were  an  article  capable  of  accumulation, 
like  money  or  merchandise,  in  enormous  aggregates 
— as  though  pleasure,  and  more  particularly  pain, 
were  subject  to  the  ordinary  rules  of  arithmetic,  so 
that  minor  quantities,  added  together,  might  mount 
up  to  an  indefinitely  gigantic  total.  Poets  and 
philosophers,  time  out  of  mind,  have  been  heart- 
broken over  the  enormous  mass  of  evil  in  the  world, 
and  have  spoken  as  though  animated  nature  were 
one  great  organism,  with  a  brain  in  which  every 
pang  that  afflicted  each  one  of  its  innumerable 
members  was  piled  up  into  a  huge,  pyramidal 
agony.  But  this  is  obviously  not  so.  That  very 
"individuation"  which  to  some  philosophies  is  the 
primal  curse — the  condition  by  all  means  to  be 
annulled  and  shaken  off  l — forbids  the  adding  up 
of  units  of  sentience.  If  "individuation"  is  the 
source  of  human  misery  (which  seems  a  rather 
meaningless  proposition)  it  is  beyond  all  doubt  its 
boundary  and  limit.  We  are  each  of  us  his  own 
universe.  With  each  of  us  the  universe  is  born 
afresh;  with  each  of  us  it  dies — assuming,  that  is 
to  say,  that  consciousness  is  extinguished  at  death. 

i  Mr.  Wells  himself  is  not  far  from  this  view.    See  God  the 
Invisible  King,  pp.  73,  76,  and  this  book,  pp.  39-40. 


22 GOD  AND  MR.  WELLS 

There  never  has  been  and  never  can  be  in  the  world 
more  suffering  than  a  single  organism  can  sustain 
— which  is  another  way  of  saying  that  nothing  can 
hurt  us  more  than  we  can  be  hurt.  Is  this  an  opti- 
mistic statement?  Far  from  it.  The  individual 
is  capable  of  great  extremities  of  suffering;  and 
though  not  all  men,  or  even  most,  are  put  to  the 
utmost  test  in  this  respect,  there  are  certainly  cases 
not  a  few  in  which  a  man  may  well  curse  the  day 
he  was  born,  and  see  in  the  universe  that  was  born 
with  him  nothing  but  an  instrument  of  torture. 
But  such  an  one  must  speak  for  himself.  It  is 
evident  that,  take  them  all  round,  men  accept  life 
as  no  such  evil  gift.  It  cannot  even  be  said  that,  in 
handing  it  on  to  others,  they  are  driven  by  a  fatal 
instinct  which  they  know  in  their  hearts  to  be  cruel, 
and  would  resist  if  they  could.  The  vast  majority 
have  been,  and  still  are,  entirely  light-hearted  about 
the  matter,  thus  giving  the  best  possible  proof  that 
they  cherish  no  grudge  against  the  source  of  being, 
but  find  it,  on  the  balance,  acceptable  enough.  If 
it  be  said  that  this  is  due  to  stupidity,  then  stupidity 
is  one  of  the  factors  in  the  case  which  the  great 
Artificer  must  be  supposed  to  have  foreseen  and 
reckoned  upon.  All  these  considerations  must  be 
taken  into  account  when  we  try  to  sum  up  the  re- 


NEW  MYTHS  FOR  OLD 23 

sponsibility  of  an  organizer  and  director  of  life, 
acting  of  his  own  free  will,  although  he  knew  that 
the  conditions  under  which  he  had  to  work  would 
make  the  achievement  of  any  satisfactory  result  a 
slow,  laborious  and  painful  business. 

"But  sympathy!"  it  may  be  said — "You  have 
left  sympathy  out  of  the  reckoning.  Unless  we  are 
not  only  'individuals'  but  iron-clad  egotists,  we  suf- 
fer with  others  more  keenly,  sometimes,  than  in 
our  own  persons."  Sympathy,  no  doubt,  is,  like 
the  summer  sun  and  the  frost  of  winter,  a  fact  of 
common  experience  causing  us  alternate  joy  and 
pain;  but  it  means  no  sort  of  breach  in  the  wall  of 
"individuation."  Our  nearest  and  dearest  are 
simply  factors  in  our  environment,  most  influential 
factors,  but  as  external  to  us  as  the  trees  or  the 
stars.  We  cannot,  in  any  real  sense,  draw  away 
their  pains  and  add  them  to  our  own,  any  more 
than  they,  in  their  turn,  can  relieve  us  of  our 
toothache  or  our  sciatica.  They  are  the  points, 
doubtless,  at  which  our  environment  touches  us 
most  closely,  but  neither  incantation  nor  Act  of 
Parliament,  neither  priest  nor  registrar,  can  make 
even  man  and  wife  really  "one  flesh."  It  was 
necessary  for  the  conservation  of  the  species  that 
a  strict  limit  should  be  set  to  the  operation  of 


24 GOD  AND  MR.  WELLS 

sympathy.  Had  that  emotion  been  able  to  pierce 
the  shell  of  individuality,  so  that  one  being  could 
actually  add  the  sufferings  of  another,  or  of  many 
others,  to  his  own,  life  would  long  ago  have  come 
to  an  end.  As  it  is,  sympathy  implies  an  imagina- 
tive extension  of  individuality,  which  is  of  enor- 
mous social  value.  But  we  remain,  none  the  less, 
isolated  each  in  his  own  universe,  and  our  fellow- 
men  and  women  are  but  shapes  in  the  panorama, 
the  strange,  fantastic  dream,  which  the  Veiled 
Showman  unrolls  before  us. 

In  these  post-Darwinian  days,  moreover,  we  are 
inclined  to  give  way  to  certain  morbid  and  senti- 
mental exaggerations  of  sympathy,  which  do  some 
injustice  to  the  great  Artificer  whom  we  are  for 
the  moment  assuming  to  be  responsible  for  sentient 
life.  Many  of  us  are  much  concerned  about  "na- 
ture, red  in  tooth  and  claw."  It  is  a  sort  of  night- 
mare to  us  to  think  of  the  tremendous  fecundity 
of  swamp  and  jungle,  warren  and  pond,  and  of  the 
ruthless  struggle  for  existence  which  has  made 
earth,  air,  and  sea  one  mighty  battle-ground.  In 
this  we  are  again  letting  the  fallacy  of  number 
take  hold  of  us.  There  can  be  no  aggregate  of 
suffering  among  lower,  any  more  than  among 
higher,  organisms;  and  the  amount  of  pain  which 


NEW  MYTHS  FOR  OLD 25 

individual  animals  have  to  endure — even  animals 
of  those  species  which  we  can  suppose  to  possess 
a  certain  keenness  of  sensibility — is  probably,  in 
the  vast  majority  of  cases,  very  trifling.  Half  the 
anguish  of  humanity  proceeds  from  the  power  of 
looking  before  and  after.  The  animal,  though  he 
may  suffer  from  fear  of  imminent,  visible  danger, 
cannot  know  the  torture  of  long-drawn  apprehen- 
sion. For  most  of  his  life  he  is  probably  aware  of 
a  vague  well-being;  then  of  a  longer  or  shorter — 
often  a  very  short — spell  of  vague  ill-being;  and 
so,  the  end.  Nor  is  it  possible  to  doubt  that  the 
experience  of  some  animals  includes  a  great  deal 
of  positive  rapture.  If  the  lark  be  not  really  the 
soul  of  joy,  he  is  the  greatest  hypocrite  under  the 
sun.  Many  insects  seem  to  be  pin-points  of  vibrant 
vitality  which  we  can  scarcely  believe  to  be  un- 
accompanied by  pleasurable  sensation.  The  mos- 
quito which  I  squash  on  the  back  of  my  hand,  and 
which  dies  in  a  bath  of  my  own  blood,  has  had  a 
short  life  but  doubtless  a  merry  one.  The  moths 
which,  in  a  tropic  night,  lie  in  calcined  heaps 
around  the  lamp,  have  probably  perished  in  pur- 
suit of  some  ecstatic  illusion.  It  does  not  seem,  on 
the  whole,  that  we  need  expend  much  pity  on  the 
brute  creation,  or  make  its  destinies  a  reproach  to 


26  GOD  AND  MR.  WELLS 

the  great  Artificer.  Which  is  not  to  say,  of  course, 
that  we  ought  not  to  detest  and  try  with  all  our 
might  to  abolish  the  cruelties  of  labor,  commerce, 
sport  and  war. 

Again,  as  to  the  great  calamities — the  earth- 
quakes, shipwrecks,  railway  accidents,  even  the 
wars — which  are  often  made  a  leading  count  in  the 
arraignment  of  the  Author  of  Sentience,  we  must 
not  let  ourselves  be  deceived  by  the  fallacy  of  num- 
ber. Their  spectacular,  dramatic  aspect  naturally 
attracts  attention;  but  the  death-roll  of  a  great  ship- 
wreck is  in  fact  scarcely  more  terrible  than  the 
daily  bills  of  mortality  of  a  great  city.  It  is  true 
that  a  violent  death,  overtaking  a  healthy  man,  is 
apt  to  involve  moments,  perhaps  hours,  of  acute  dis- 
tress which  he  might  have  escaped  had  he  died  of 
gradual  decay  or  of  ordinary  well-tended  disease; 
and  a  very  short  space  of  the  agony  sometimes  at- 
tendant upon  (say)  a  railway  accident,  probably 
represents  itself  to  the  sufferer  as  an  eternity.  But 
there  is  also  another  side  to  the  matter.  Instanta- 
neous death  in  a  great  catastrophe  must  be  reckoned 
as  mere  euthanasia;  and  even  short  of  this,  the 
attendant  excitement  has  often  the  effect  of  an 
anodyne.  In  the  upshot,  no  doubt,  such  occur- 
rences are  rightly  called  disasters,  since  their  ten- 


NEW  MYTHS  FOR  OLD 27 

dency  is  to  cause  needlessly  painful  death,  under 
circumstances,  which  in  the  main,  enhance  its  ter- 
rors; but  the  sufferings  of  the  victims  cannot  be 
added  together  because  they  occur  within  a  limited 
area,  any  more  than  if  they  had  been  spread  over 
an  indefinite  tract  of  space.  As  for  war,  it  in- 
creases the  liability  of  every  individual  who  comes 
within  its  wide-flung  net  to  intense  bodily  and  men- 
tal suffering,  and  to  premature  and  painful  death. 
Moreover,  it  destroys  social  values  which  can  be 
added  up.  In  this  respect  it  leaves  the  world  face 
to  face  with  an  appalling  deficit.  But  we  must  not 
let  it  weigh  upon  us  too  heavily,  or  make  it  too 
great  a  reproach  to  the  Artificer  of  human  des- 
tiny. For  the  soldier,  like  every  other  sentient  or- 
ganism, is  immured  in  his  own  universe,  and  his 
individual  debit-and-credit  account  with  the  Power 
which  placed  him  there  would  be  no  whit  different 
if  he  were  indeed  the  only  real  existence,  and  the 
world  around  him  were  naught  but  a  dance  of 
shadows. 

If  there  were  a  country  of  a  hundred  million 
people,  in  which  every  citizen  was  born  to  an 
allowance  of  five  pounds,  which  in  all  his  life  he 
could  not  possibly  increase,  or  invest  in  joint-stock 
enterprises,  though  he  might  leave  some  of  it 


28  GOD  AND  MR.  WELLS 

unexpended — we  should  not,  in  spite  of  the 
£500,000,000  of  its  capital,  call  that  a  wealthy 
country.  Its  effective  wealth  would  be  precisely 
a  five-pound  note.  Similarly,  given  a  world  in 
which  every  one  is  born  with  a  limited  capacity  of 
sentience,  inalienable,  incommunicable,  unique,  we 
should  do  wrong  to  call  that  world  a  multi-million- 
aire in  misery,  even  if  it  could  be  proved  that  in 
each  individual  account  the  balance  of  sensation 
was  on  the  wrong  side  of  the  ledger.  It  is  true 
that  if,  in  one  man's  account,  the  balance  were 
largely  to  the  bad,  he  would  be  entitled  to  reproach 
the  Veiled  Banker,  even  though  five  hundred 
or  five  thousand  of  his  fellows  declared  themselves 
satisfied  with  the  result  of  their  audit.  But  if  the 
Banker,  in  opening  business,  had  good  reason  to 
think  that,  in  the  long  run,  the  contents  would 
largely  outvote  the  non-contents,  we  could  scarcely 
blame  him  for  going  ahead.  And  what  if,  for 
contents  and  malcontents  alike,  he  had  an  un- 
covenanted  bonus  up  his  sleeve? 

In  this  disquisition,  with  its  shifting  personifica- 
tions, its  Artificer,  Author,  Banker  and  the  like, 
we  may  seem  to  have  wandered  far  away  from 
Mr.  Wells  and  his  Invisible  King;  but  I  hope  the 


NEW  MYTHS  FOR  OLD 29 

reader  has  not  wholly  lost  the  clue.  Let  us  re- 
capitulate. Starting  from  the  idea  that  its  total 
renunciation  of  metaphysics,  its  incuriousness  as 
to  causation,  was  a  weakness  in  Mr.  Wells's  sys- 
tem, inasmuch  as  an  eager  curiosity  as  to  these 
matters  is  an  inseparable  part  of  our  intellectual 
outfit,  we  set  about  enquiring  whether  it  might  not 
be  possible  to  abandon  the  notions  of  omnipotence, 
omniscience  and  omni-benevolence,  and  yet  to 
conceive  a  doctrine  of  origins  into  which  a  well- 
willing  God  should  enter,  not,  like  the  Invisible 
King,  as  a  sort  of  remedial  afterthought,  but  as 
a  prime  mover  in  this  baffling  business  of  life.  We 
put  forward  two  hypotheses,  each  of  which  seemed 
more  thinkable,  less  in  the  air,  so  to  speak,  than 
Mr.  Wells's  scheme  of  things.  We  imagined  a 
wholly  callous,  unpitying  Power,  wantonly  setting 
up  combinations  in  matter  which  it  knew  would 
work  out  in  cruelty  and  misery,  and  another  co- 
ordinate though  not  quite  equal  Power  interfering 
from  the  first  to  introduce  into  the  combinations 
of  the  Elder  Deity  a  slow  but  sure  bias  towards 
the  good.  Then  we  proposed  an  alternative 
hypothesis,  logically  simpler,  though  more  difficult 
from  the  moral  point  of  view.  We  conceived  at 
the  source  of  organic  life  an  intelligent  and  well- 


30 GOD  AND  MR.  WELLS 

willing  Power  constrained,  by  some  necessity 
"behind  the  veil,"  to  carry  out  his  purposes 
through  the  sluggish,  refractory,  hampering 
medium  of  matter.  Supposing  this  Power  free  to 
act  or  to  refrain  from  acting,  we  asked  whether 
he  could  take  the  affirmative  course — choose  the 
"Everlasting  Yea"  as  Carlyle  would  phrase  it — 
without  forfeiting  our  esteem  and  disqualifying  for 
the  post  of  Invisible  King  in  the  Wellsian  sense  of 
the  term.  In  a  tentative  way,  not  exempt,  per- 
haps, from  a  touch  of  special  pleading,  we  ad- 
vanced certain  considerations  which  seemed  to 
suggest  that  his  decision  to  kindle  the  torch  of  life 
might,  after  all,  be  justified.  Our  provisional 
conclusion  was  that  though,  as  at  present  advised, 
we  might  not  quite  see  our  way  to  hail  him  as  a 
beneficent  Invisible  King,  yet  we  need  not  go  to 
the  opposite  extreme  of  writing  him  down  a  mere 
Ogre  God,  indifferent  to  the  vast  and  purposeless 
process  of  groaning  and  travail,  begetting  and  de- 
vouring, which  he  had  wantonly  initiated.  That 
is  the  point  at  which  we  have  now  arrived. 

I  hope  it  need  not  be  said  I  do  not  attribute 
any  substantive  value  to  the  hypothetical  myths 
here  put  forward  and  discussed — that  I  do  not 
accept  either  of  them,  or  propose  that  anyone  else 


NEW  MYTHS  FOR  OLD 31 

should  accept  it,  as  a  probable  adumbration  of 
what  actually  occurred  "in  the  beginning" — a 
first  chapter  in  a  new  Book  of  Genesis.  My  pur- 
pose was  simply,  since  myth-making  was  the  order 
of  the  day,  to  hint  a  criticism  of  Mr.  Wells's  myth, 
by  placing  beside  it  one  or  two  other  fantasies, 
perhaps  as  plausible  as  his,  which  had  the  advan- 
tage of  not  entirely  eluding  the  question  of  origins. 
I  submit,  with  great  respect,  that  my  Artificer 
comes  a  little  less  out  of  the  blue  than  his  Invisible 
King — that  is  all  I  claim  for  him. 

But  here  Mr.  Wells  puts  in  a  protest,  not  with- 
out indignation.  Myth-making,  he  declares,  is  not 
the  order  of  the  day.  Had  he  wanted  to  indulge 
in  myth-making,  he  could  easily  have  found  some 
metaphysical  affiliation  for  his  Invisible  King. 
What  he  has  done  is  to  record  a  profound  spiritual 
experience,  common  to  himself  and  many  other 
good  men  and  true,  which  has  culminated  in  the 
recognition  of  an  actual  Power,  objectively  extant 
in  the  world,  to  which  he  has  felt  it  a  sacred  duty 
to  bear  witness.  Very  good;  so  be  it;  let  us  now 
look  more  in  detail  into  the  gospel  according  to 
Wells. 


IV 

THE  APOSTLE'S  CREED 

A  GOSPEL  it  is,  in  all  literalness;  an 
evangel;  a  message  of  glad  tidings.  It 
is  not  merely  a  truth,  it  is  "the  Truth" 
(p.  1).  Let  there  be  no  mistake  about  it:  Mr. 
Wells's  ambition  is  to  rank  with  St.  Paul  and 
Mahomet,  as  the  apostle  of  a  new  world-religion. 
He  does  not  in  so  many  words  lay  claim  to  in- 
spiration, but  it  is  almost  inevitably  deducible 
from  his  premises.  He  is  uttering  the  first  clear 
and  definite  tidings  of  a  God  who  is  endowed  with 
personality,  character,  will  and  purpose.  To  that 
Deity  he  has  submitted  himself  in  enthusiastic 
devotion.  If  the  God  does  not  seize  the  oppor- 
tunity to  speak  through  such  a  marvellously  suit- 
able, such  an  ideal,  mouthpiece,  then  practical 
common-sense  cannot  be  one  of  his  attributes. 
Which  of  the  other  Gods  who  have  announced 
themselves  from  time  to  time  has  found  such  a 
megaphone  to  reverberate  his  voice?  St.  Paul  was 
a  poor  tent-maker,  whose  sermons  were  not  even 

32 


THE  APOSTLE'S  CREED 33 

reported  in  the  religious  press,  while  his  letters 
probably  counted  their  public  by  scores,  or  at  most 
by  hundreds.  Mr.  Wells,  from  the  outset  of  his 
mission,  has  the  ear  of  two  hemispheres. 

What,  then,  does  he  tell  us  of  his  God?  The 
first  characteristic  which  differentiates  him  from 
all  the  other  Gods  with  a  big  G — for  of  course  we 
pay  no  heed  to  the  departmental  gods  of  polythe- 
ism— the  first  fact  we  must  grasp  and  hold  fast  to, 
is  that  he  lays  no  claim  to  infinity.  "This  new 
faith  .  .  .  worships  a  finite  God"  (p.  5;  Mr. 
Wells's  italics).  "He  has  begun  and  he  never 
will  end"  (p.  18).  "He  is  within  time  and  not 
outside  it"  (p.  7).  Nothing  can  be  more  definite 
than  that.  There  was  a  time  when  God  did  not 
exist;  and  then  somehow,  somewhen,  he  came  into 
being. 

Perhaps  to  ask  "When?"  would  be  to  trespass 
on  the  department  of  origins,  from  which  we  are 
explicitly  warned  off.  It  would  be  to  trench  upon 
"cosmogony."  Yet  we  are  not  quite  without 
guidance.  "The  renascent  religion,"  we  are  told, 
"has  always  been  here;  it  has  always  been  visible 
to  those  that  had  eyes  to  see"  (p.  1).  "Always," 
in  this  context,  can  only  mean  during  the  whole 
course  of  human  history.  Therefore  God  must 


34 GOD  AND  MR.  WELLS 

have  come  into  being  some  time  between  the  issue 
of  the  creative  fiat  and  the  appearance  of  man  on 
the  planet.  This  is  a  pretty  wide  margin,  but  it  is 
something  to  go  upon.  He  may  have  been  con- 
temporary with  the  amoeba,  or  with  the  ichthyo- 
saurus, or  haply  with  the  earliest  quadrumana. 
At  the  very  latest  (if  "always"  is  accurate)  he 
must  have  made  his  appearance  exactly  at  the 
same  time  as  man;  and  if  I  were  to  give  my 
opinion,  I  should  say  that  was  extremely  probable. 
At  all  events,  even  if  he  preceded  man  by  a  few 
thousand  or  million  years,  we  are  compelled  to 
assume  that  he  came  in  preparation  for  the  advent 
of  the  human  species,  determined  to  be  on  hand 
when  wanted.  For  we  do  not  gather  that  the  lower 
animals  stand  in  need  of  his  services,  or  are  capable 
of  benefiting  by  them.  One  might  be  tempted  to 
conceive  him  as  guiding  the  course  of  evolution  and 
hastening  its  laggard  process;  but  (as  we  shall 
see)  he  scorns  the  role  of  Providence,  and  reso- 
lutely abstains  from  any  intromission  in  organic 
or  meteorological  concerns.  It  would  be  pleasant 
to  think  that  he  had  something  to  do  with  (for 
instance)  the  retreat  of  the  ice-cap  in  the  northern 
hemisphere;  but  we  are  not  encouraged  to  indulge 
in  any  such  speculation.  It  would  appear  that  the 


THE  APOSTLE'S  CREED  35 

activity  of  God  is  purely  psychical  and  moral — 
that  he  has  no  interest  in  biology,  except  as  it 
influences,  and  is  influenced  by,  sociology.  In 
short,  from  all  that  one  can  make  out,  this  God  is 
strictly  correlative  to  Man;  and  that  is  a  significant 
fact  which  we  shall  do  well  to  bear  in  mind. 

As  we  have  already  seen,  the  Infinite  (or  Veiled) 
Being  is  not  God  (p.  13) ;  nor  is  God  the  Life 
Force,  the  "impulse  thrusting  through  matter  and 
clothing  itself  in  continually  changing  material 
forms  ...  the  Will  to  Be"  (pp.  15-16).  As  we 
have  also  seen,  Mr.  Wells  refuses  to  define  the 
relation  of  his  God,  this  "spirit,"  this  "single 
spirit  and  single  person,"  to  either  of  these  in- 
scrutable entities.  "God,"  he  says,  "comes  to  us 
neither  out  of  the  stars  nor  out  of  the  pride  of  life, 
but  as  a  still  small  voice  within"  (p.  18).  It  is  by 
"faith"  that  we  "find"  him  (p.  13) ;  but  Mr.  Wells 
"doubts  if  faith  can  be  complete  and  enduring  if 
it  is  not  secured  by  the  definite  knowledge  of  the 
true  God"  (p.  135).  What,  then,  is  "faith"  in 
this  context?  It  would  be  too  much  to  say,  with 
the  legendary  schoolboy,  that  it  is  "believing  what 
you  know  isn't  true."  The  implication  seems 
rather  to  be  that  if  you  begin  by  believing  on  in- 
adequate grounds,  you  will  presently  attain  to 


36 GOD  AND  MR.  WELLS 

belief  on  adequate  grounds,  or,  in  other  words, 
knowledge.  Thus,  when  you  go  to  a  spiritual 
seance  in  a  sceptical  frame  of  mind,  the  chill  of 
your  aura  frightens  the  spirits  away,  and  you 
obtain  no  manifestations;  but  if  you  go  in  a  mood 
of  faith,  which  practically  means  confident  expec- 
tation, the  phenomena  follow,  and  you  depart  a 
convert.  I  use  this  illustration  in  no  scoffing 
spirit.  The  presupposition  is  not  irrational.  It 
amounts,  in  effect,  to  saying  that  you  must  go 
some  way  to  meet  God  before  God  can  or  will 
come  to  you.  This  seems  a  curious  coyness;  but 
as  God  is  finite  and  conditioned,  a  bit  of  a  char- 
acter ("a  strongly  marked  and  knowable  per- 
sonality," p.  5),  there  is  nothing  contradictory 
in  it.  Even  when  we  read  that  "the  true  God 
goes  through  the  world  like  fifes  and  drums  and 
flags,  calling  for  recruits  along  the  street"  (p.  40), 
we  must  not  seize  upon  the  letter  of  a  similitude, 
and  talk  about  inconsistency.  You  must  go  out 
to  meet  even  the  Salvation  Army.  It  offers  you 
salvation  in  vain  if  you  obstinately  bolt  your  door, 
and  insist  that  an  Englishman's  house  is  his  castle. 
The  finding  of  this  God  is  very  like  what  revival- 
ists call  "conversion"  (p.  21).  You  are  oppressed 
by  "the  futility  of  the  individual  life";  you  fall 


THE  APOSTLE'S  CREED 37 

into  "a  state  of  helpless  self -disgust"  (p.  21); 
you  are,  in  short,  in  the  condition  described  by 
Hamlet  when  he  says:  "It  goes  so  heavily  with  my 
disposition  that  this  goodly  frame  the  earth  seems 
to  me  a  sterile  promontory;  this  most  excellent 
canopy  the  air,  look  you,  this  brave  o'erhanging 
firmament,  this  majestical  roof  fretted  with  golden 
fire,  why  it  appears  no  other  thing  to  me  but  a 
foul  and  pestilent  congregation  of  vapors."  The 
condition  may  result,  as  in  Hamlet's  case,  from  an 
untoward  conjunction  of  outward  circumstances; 
or  it  may  be  of  physiological  (liverish)  origin. 
The  methods  of  treatment  are  many — some  of  them 
(such  as  the  administration  of  alcohol  in  large 
doses)  disastrously  unwise.  In  some  states  of 
society  and  periods  of  history,  religion  is  the  popu- 
lar specific;  and  there  have  been,  and  are,  forms 
of  religion  to  which  alcohol  would  be  preferable. 
Fortunately,  one  can  say  without  a  shadow  of 
hesitancy  that  "the  modern  religion"  lies  under 
no  such  suspicion.  As  dispensed  by  Mr.  Wells,  it 
is  entirely  wholesome.  If  it  is  found  to  cheer,  it 
will  certainly  not  inebriate.  Indeed,  the  doubt 
one  feels  as  to  its  popular  success  lies  in  the  very 
fact  that  it  contains  but  an  innocuous  proportion  of 
alcohol. 


38 GOD  AND  MR.  WELLS 

You  find  yourself,  then,  in  the  distressful  case 
described  by  Hamlet  and  Mr.  Wells.  "Man  de- 
lights you  not,  no,  nor  woman  neither."  You 
cannot  muster  up  energy  even  to  kill  King 
Claudius.  You  go  about  gloomily  soliloquizing  on 
suicide  and  kindred  topics.  Then,  "in  some  way 
the  idea  of  God  comes  into  the  distressed  mind" 
(p.  21).  It  develops  through  various  stages,  out- 
lined by  Mr.  Wells  in  the  passage  cited.  In  the 
modern  man,  it  would  seem,  one  great  difficulty 
lies  in  "a  curious  resistance  to  the  suggestion  that 
God  is  truly  a  person"  (p.  22).  It  is  here,  no 
doubt,  that  faith  comes  in;  at  all  events,  you 
ultimately  get  over  this  stumbling-block.  "Then 
suddenly,  in  a  little  while,  in  his  own  time,  God 
comes.  The  cardinal  experience  is  an  undoubting 
immediate  sense  of  God.  It  is  the  attainment  of 
an  absolute  certainty  that  one  is  not  alone  in  one- 
self" (p.  23).  You  have  come,  in  fact,  to  the  gate 
of  Damascus.  You  have  found  salvation. 

Yes,  salvation! — there  is  no  other  word  for  it. 
Mr.  Wells  does  not  hesitate  to  use  both  that  word 
and  its  correlative,  damnation.  From  what,  then, 
are  you  saved?  Why,  from  quite  a  number  of 
things.  You  are  saved  "from  the  purposelessness 
of  life"  (p.  18).  God's  immortality  has  "taken 


THE  APOSTLE'S  CREED 39 

the  sting  from  death"  (p.  22).  You  have  escaped 
"from  the  painful  accidents  and  chagrins  of  in- 
dividuation"  (p.  73).  "Salvation  is  to  lose  one- 
self" (p.  73) ;  it  is  "a  complete  turning  away 
from  self"  (p.  84).  "Damnation  is  really  over- 
individuation,  and  salvation  is  escape  from  self 
into  the  larger  being  of  life"  (p.  76).  In  another 
place  we  are  told  that  salvation  is  "escape  from 
the  individual  distress  at  disharmony  and  the  in- 
dividual defeat  by  death,  into  the  Kingdom  of 
God,  and  damnation  can  be  nothing  more  and 
nothing  less  than  the  failure  or  inability  or  dis- 
inclination to  make  that  escape"  (p.  148).  On  the 
next  page  we  have  another  definition  of  damna- 
tion (borrowed,  it  would  seem,  from  Mr.  Glutton 
Brock),  with  which  I  hasten  to  express  my  cordial 
and  enthusiastic  agreement:  "Satisfaction  with 
existing  things  is  damnation"  I  have  always 
thought  that  hell  was  the  headquarters  of  con- 
servatism, and  am  delighted  to  find  such  influential 
backing  for  that  pious  opinion. 

As  for  sin,  it  seems  to  be  a  falling  away  from 
the  state  of  grace  attained  through  conversion. 
You  can  and  do  sin  while  you  are  still  unconverted ; 
for  we  are  told  that  "repentance  is  the  beginning 
and  essential  of  the  religious  life"  (p.  165). 


40 GOD  AND  MR.  WELLS 

Probably  (though  this  is  not  clear)  your  unregener- 
ate  condition  is  in  itself  sinful,  "individuation"  be- 
ing not  very  different  from  the  Original  Sin  of  the 
theologians.  But  it  is  sin  after  regeneration  that 
really  matters.  "Salvation  leaves  us  still  dishar- 
monious, and  adds  not  one  inch  to  our  spiritual  and 
moral  nature"  (p.  146).  "It  is  the  amazing  and 
distressful  discovery  of  every  believer  so  soon  as 
the  first  exaltation  of  belief  is  past,  that  one  does 
not  remain  always  in  touch  with  God"  (p.  149). 
One  blackslides.  One  reverts  to  one's  unregener- 
ate  type.  The  old  Adam  makes  disquieting  resur- 
gences in  the  swept  and  garnished  mansion  from 
which  he  seemed  to  have  been  for  ever  cast  out. 
"This  is  the  personal  problem  of  Sin.  Here  prayer 
avails;  here  God  can  help  us"  (p.  150).  And 
what  is  still  more  consoling,  "though  you  sin  sev- 
enty times  seven  times,  God  will  still  forgive  the 
poor  rest  of  you.  .  .  .  There  is  no  sin,  no  state 
that,  being  regretted  and  repented  of,  can  stand  be- 
tween God  and  man"  (p.  156). 

We  shall  have  to  consider  later  what  useful  pur- 
pose (if  any)  is  served  by  this  free-and-easy  use 
of  the  dialect  of  revivalism.  In  the  meantime,  one 
would  be  sorry  to  seem  to  write  without  respect  of 
the  depth  of  conviction  which  Mr.  Wells  throws  into 


THE  APOSTLE'S  CREED  41 

his  account  of  the  supreme  spiritual  experience  of 
finding  God.  "Thereafter,"  he  says,  "one  goes 
about  the  world  like  one  who  was  lonely  and  has 
found  a  lover,  like  one  who  was  perplexed  and  has 
found  a  solution"  (pp.  23-24).  God  is  a  "huge 
friendliness,  a  great  brother  and  leader  of  our  lit- 
tle beings"  (p.  24).  "He  is  a  stimulant;  he  makes 
us  live  immortally  and  more  abundantly.  I  have 
compared  him  to  the  sensation  of  a  dear  strong 
friend  who  comes  and  stands  quietly  beside  one, 
shoulder  to  shoulder"  (p.  39).  It  certainly  takes 
some  courage  for  a  modern  Englishman,  not  by 
profession  a  licensed  dealer  in  spiritual  sentimen- 
tality, to  write  like  this. 

And  now  comes  the  question,  What  does  God  do? 
What  does  he  aim  at?  And  how  does  he  effect  his 
purposes?  The  answer  seems  to  be  that,  in  a  lit- 
eral, tangible  sense,  he  does  nothing.  He  operates 
solely  in  and  through  the  mind  of  man;  and  even 
through  the  mind  of  man  he  does  not  influence  ex- 
ternal events.  This,  it  may  be  said,  is  impossible, 
since  all  those  external  events  which  we  call  human 
conduct  flow  from  the  mind  of  man.  Perhaps  it 
would  be  correct  to  say  (for  here  Mr.  Wells  gives 
us  no  explicit  guidance)  that  external  events  are 
only  a  by-product  of  the  influence  of  God:  that, 


42  GOD  AND  MR.  WELLS 

having  begotten  a  certain  spiritual  state  which  he 
feels  to  be  generally  desirable,  he  takes  no  re- 
sponsibility for  the  particular  consequences  that 
are  likely  to  flow  from  it.  So,  at  least,  one  can  best 
interpret  Mr.  Wells's  repeated  disclaimer  of  the 
idea  that  "God  is  Magic  or  God  is  Providence" 
(p.  27),  that  "all  the  time,  incalculably,  he  is 
pulling  about  the  order  of  events  for  our  personal 
advantages"  (p.  35-6).  Commenting  on  Mr.  Ed- 
wyn  Bevan's  phrase  for  God,  "the  Friend  behind 
phenomena,"  Mr.  Wells  insists  that  the  expression 
"carries  with  it  no  obligation  whatever  to  believe 
that  this  Friend  is  in  control  of  the  phenomena" 
(p.  87).  Perhaps  not;  but  it  is  a  question  for 
after  consideration  whether  lucidity  is  promoted  by 
giving  the  name  God  to  a  Power  which  has  no  power 
— which  does  not  seem  even  to  make  directly  pur- 
posive use  of  the  influence  which  it  possesses  over 
the  minds  of  believers.  Once,  in  a  coasting 
steamer  on  the  Pacific,  I  nearly  died  of  sea-sick- 
ness. A  friend  was  with  me,  the  soul  of  kindness, 
such  a  lovable  old  man  that  I  write  this  down  partly 
for  the  pleasure  of  recalling  him.  He  used  to 
come  to  my  cabin  every  hour  or  so,  shake  his  head 
mournfully,  and  go  away  again.  I  felt  his  good 
will  and  was  grateful  for  it;  but  it  would  be  affecta- 


THE  APOSTLE'S  CREED 43 

tion  to  pretend  that  I  would  not  have  been  still  more 
grateful  had  he  possessed  some  "control  of  phe- 
nomena"— had  he  brought  with  him  a  remedy. 
Since  those  days,  more  than  one  efficacious  prevent- 
ive of  sea-sickness  has  been  discovered;  and  I  own 
to  counting  the  nameless  chemists  who  have 
achieved  this  marvel  among  the  most  authentic 
friends  to  poor  humanity  of  whom  we  have  any 
knowledge.  Where  is  the  God  (as  Mr.  Zangwill 
has  pertinently  enquired)  who  will  give  us  a  cure 
for  cancer? 

This,  however,  is  a  digression,  or  at  any  rate 
an  anticipation.  What  the  Invisible  King  actually 
does,  without  meddling  with  phenomena,  is  to  as- 
sume the  "captaincy"  of  the  "racial  adventure"  in 
which  we  are  engaged  (p.  76).  "God  must  love 
his  followers  as  a  great  captain  loves  his  men  .  .  . 
whose  faith  alone  makes  him  possible.  It  is  an 
austere  love.  The  Spirit  of  God  will  not  hesitate 
to  send  us  to  torment  and  bodily  death"  (p.  67). 
And  what  is  this  "racial  adventure"?  It  is,  in  the 
first  place,  the  achievement  of  Mr.  Wells's  political 
ideals — an  object  which  has  all  my  sympathy,  since 
they  happen  to  be,  generally  speaking,  my  own. 
"As  a  knight  in  God's  service,"  says  Mr.  Wells,  "I 
take  sides  against  injustice,  disorder,  and  against 


44 GOD  AND  MR.  WELLS 

all  those  temporal  kings,  emperors,  princes,  land- 
lords, and  owners,  who  set  themselves  up  against 
God's  rule  and  worship"  (p.  97).  By  all  means! 
Only  one  does  not  see  how,  if  the  kings,  emperors 
and  landlords  declare  that  they,  too,  have  found 
God,  and  found  him  on  the  side  of  monarchy  and 
landlordism,  this  contention  of  theirs  is  to  be  con- 
futed. If  God  does  not  control  phenomena,  the 
actual  controllers  of  events  will  be  able  to  main- 
tain in  the  future,  as  in  the  past,  that  he  is  on  the 
side  of  the  big  battalions — an  argument  which  it 
will  be  hard  to  meet,  except  by  raising  bigger  bat- 
talions. In  the  meantime  we  have  to  note  that 
God's  political  opinions  are  only  provisional,  and 
that  he  himself  is  open  to  conviction.  "The  first 
purpose  of  God  is  the  attainment  of  clear  knowl- 
edge, of  knowledge  as  a  means  to  more  knowledge, 
and  of  knowledge  as  a  means  to  power"  (p.  98-9). 
And  the  object  to  which  he  will  apply  this  power 
is  "the  conquest  of  death:  first  the  overcoming  of 
death  in  the  individual  by  the  incorporation  of  the 
motives  of  his  life  into  an  undying  purpose,  and 
then  the  defeat  of  that  death  which  seems  to  threaten 
our  species  upon  a  cooling  planet  beneath  a  cool- 
ing sun"  (p.  99).  Ultimately,  then,  it  would  seem 
that  God  does  intend  to  undertake  the  control  of 


THE  APOSTLE'S  CREED 45 

phenomena.  Dealing  with  ice-caps  is  not  so  en- 
tirely outside  his  province  as  one  had  hastily  as- 
sumed. The  Invisible  King  is  not,  after  all,  a 
roi  faineant.  He  will  begin  to  do  things  as  soon 
as  he  knows  how:  any  other  course  would  be  ob- 
viously rash.  One  would  like  to  live  a  few  hun- 
dred thousand  years,  to  see  him  come  into  overt 
action.  Yet,  in  this  far-reaching  program,  there 
seems  to  lurk  a  certain  contradiction,  or  at  least 
an  ambiguity.  If,  for  the  believer  in  God,  death 
has,  here  and  now,  lost  its  sting — if  "we  come 
staggering  through  into  the  golden  light  of  his  king- 
dom, to  fight  for  his  kingdom  henceforth,  until,  at 
last,  we  are  altogether  taken  up  into  his  being" 
(p.  68) — one  does  not  quite  see  the  reason  for  this 
long  campaign  against  death.  Surely  the  logical 
consummation  would  be  an  ultimate  racial  eutha- 
nasia, an  absorption  of  humanity  into  God,  a  vast 
apotheosis-nirvana,  after  which  the  earth  and  sun 
could  go  on  cooling  at  their  leisure. 

Apart  from  one  or  two  irrepressible  "asides," 
I  have  attempted  in  this  chapter  to  let  Mr.  Wells 
speak  for  himself,  proclaim  the  faith  that  is  in 
him,  and  draw  the  portrait  of  his  God.  Many 
details  are  of  course  omitted,  for  which  the  reader 


46 GOD  AND  MR.  WELLS 

must  turn  to  the  original  text.  He  will  find  it  a 
pleasant  and  profitable  task.  The  remainder  of 
my  present  undertaking  falls  into  three  parts. 
First  I  must  ask  the  reader  to  consider  with  me 
whether  Mr.  Wells's  gospel  can  be  accepted  as  a 
real  addition  to  knowledge,  like  (say)  the  discovery 
of  radium,  or  whether  it  is  only  a  re-description 
in  new  language  (or  old  language  slightly  refur- 
bished) of  familiar  facts  of  spiritual  experience. 
In  the  second  place,  assuming  that  we  have  to  fall 
back  on  the  latter  alternative,  we  shall  enquire 
whether  anything  would  be  gained  by  the  general 
acceptance  of  this  new-old,  highly  emotionalized 
terminology.  Thirdly,  I  shall  venture  to  suggest 
that  when  Mr.  Wells  says  "The  first  purpose  of 
God  is  the  attainment  of  clear  knowledge,  of  knowl- 
edge as  a  means  to  more  knowledge,  and  of  knowl- 
edge as  a  means  to  power,"  he  is  only  choosing  a 
mythological  way  of  expressing  the  fact  that  if  God 
(in  the  ordinary,  non-Wellsian  sense  of  the  word) 
is  ever  to  be  found,  it  must  be  through  patient  in- 
vestigation of  the  phenomena  in  which  he  clothes 
himself. 


V 

WHEN   IS  A   GOD   NOT  A  GOD? 

THOUGH  many  of  Mr.  Wells's  asseverations 
of  the  substantive  reality  of  his  Invisible 
King  have  been  quoted  above,  it  would  be 
easy  to  lengthen  their  array.  There  is  nothing  on 
which  he  is  so  insistent.  For  example,  "God  is  no 
abstraction  nor  trick  of  words.  .  .  .*  He  is  as 
real  as  a  bayonet  thrust  or  an  embrace"  (p.  56). 
And  again,  on  the  same  page:  "He  feels  us  and 
knows  us;  he  is  helped  and  gladdened  by  us.  He 
hopes  and  attempts."  There  is  no  limit  to  the  an- 
thropomorphism of  the  language  which  Mr.  Wells 
currently  employs.  Or  rather,  there  is  only  one 
limit:  he  disclaims  the  notion  that  his  God  is  actu- 
ally existent  in  space,  that  he  has  parts  and  dimen- 
sions, and  inhabits  a  form  in  any  way  analogous  to 
ours.  He  is  the  Invisible  King,  not  merely,  like  the 

i  The  words  here  omitted,  "no  Infinite,"  are  nothing  to  the 
present  purpose.  Mr.  Wells  has  started  by  making  this  declar- 
ation, which  we  accept  without  difficulty.  No  one  will  suspect 
the  Invisible  King  of  being  an  "Infinite"  in  disguise. 

47 


48 GOD  AND  MR.  WELLS 

Spanish  Fleet,  because  he  "  is  not  yet  in  sight," 
but  because  he  has  no  material  or  "astral"  integu- 
ment. Being  outside  space  (though  inside  time) 
he  can  be  omnipresent  (p.  61).  But  of  course  Mr. 
Wells  would  not  pretend  that  no  deity  can  be  called 
anthropomorphic  who  is  not  actually  conceived  as 
incarnate  in  the  visible  figure  of  a  man.  An  an- 
thropomorphic God  is  one  who  reflects  the  mental 
characteristics  of  his  worshippers;  and  that  Mr. 
Wells's  God  does,  if  ever  God  did  in  this  world. 

Yet  almost  in  the  same  breath  in  which  he  is 
claiming  for  his  God  the  fullest  independent  reality 
— thinking  of  him  "as  having  moods  and  aspects, 
as  a  man  has,  and  a  consistency  we  call  his  char- 
acter" (p.  63) — he  will  use  language  implying  that 
he  is  that  very  abstraction  of  the  better  parts  of 
human  nature  which  has  been  proposed  for  worship 
in  all  the  various  "religions  of  humanity," 
"ethical  churches,"  and  so  forth,  for  two  or  three 
generations  past.  Listen  to  this:  "Though  he 
does  not  exist  in  matter  or  space,  he  exists  in  time, 
just  as  a  current  of  thought  may  do;  he  changes 
and  becomes  more  even  as  a  man's  thought  gathers 
itself  together;  somewhere  in  the  dawning  of  man- 
kind he  had  a  beginning,  an  awakening,  and  as 
mankind  grows  he  grows.  .  .  .  He  is  the  undying 


WHEN  IS  A  GOD  NOT  A  GOD?        49 

human  memory,  the  increasing  human  will" 
(p.  61 ) .  When,  in  the  last  chapter,  I  discussed  the 
date  of  the  divinity's  birth,  I  had  overlooked  this 
text.  Here  we  have  it  in  black  and  white  that 
he  did  not  precede  mankind — that,  of  course, 
would  have  implied  independence — but  began 
with  the  "dawning"  of  the  race,  and  has  grown 
with  its  growth.  Moreover,  the  analogy  of  a  "cur- 
rent of  thought"  is  expressly  suggested — reinforc- 
ing the  suspicion  which  has  all  along  haunted  us 
that  the  God  of  Mr.  Wells  is  nothing  else  than  what 
is  known  to  less  mythopoeic  thinkers  as  a  "stream  of 
tendency."  But  Mr.  Wells  will  by  no  means  have 
it  so.  Indeed  he  evidently  regards  this  as  the  most 
annoying,  and  perhaps  damnable,  of  heresies. 
On  the  very  next  page  he  proceeds  to  rule  out  the 
suggestion  that  "God  is  the  collective  mind  and 
purpose  of  the  human  race."  "You  may  declare," 
he  says,  "that  this  is  no  God,  but  merely  the  sum  of 
mankind.  But  those  who  believe  in  the  new  ideas 
very  steadfastly  deny  that.  God  is,  they  say,  not 
an  aggregate  but  a  synthesis."  And  he  goes  on  to 
suggest  various  analogies:  a  temple  is  more  than  a 
gathering  of  stones,  a  regiment  more  than  an  ac- 
cumulation of  men:  we  do  not  love  the  soil  of  our 
back  garden,  or  the  chalk  of  Kent,  or  the  limestone 


50 GOD  AND  MR.  WELLS 

of  Yorkshire;  yet  we  love  England,  which  is  made 
up  of  these  things.  So  God  is  more  than  the  sum 
or  essence  of  the  nobler  impulses  of  the  race:  he  is 
a  spirit,  a  person,  a  friend,  a  great  brother,  a  cap- 
tain, a  king:  he  "is  love  and  goodness"  (p  80) ; 
and  without  him  the  Service  of  Man  is  "no  better 
than  a  hobby,  a  sentimentality  or  a  hypocrisy"  (p. 
95). 

Let  us  reflect  a  little  upon  these  analogies,  and 
see  whether  they  rest  on  any  solid  basis.  Why  is 
a  temple  more  than  a  heap  of  stones?  Because 
human  intelligence  and  skill  have  entered  into  the 
stones  and  organized  them  to  serve  a  given  pur- 
pose or  set  of  purposes:  to  delight  the  eye,  to  ele- 
vate the  mind,  to  express  certain  ideas,  to  afford 
shelter  for  worshippers  against  wind,  rain  and  sun. 
Why  is  a  regiment  more  than  a  mob?  Again  be- 
cause it  has  been  deliberately  and  elaborately  or- 
ganized to  fulfil  certain  functions.  Why  is  Eng- 
land more  than  the  mere  rocks  of  which  it  is  com- 
posed? Because  these  materials  have  been 
grouped,  partly  by  nature,  but  very  largely  by  the 
labor  of  untold  generations  of  our  fathers,  into 
forms  which  give  pleasure  to  the  eye  and  appeal  to 
our  most  intimate  and  cherished  associations.  Be- 
sides, when  we  speak  of  "England,"  we  do  not  think 


WHEN  IS  A  GOD  NOT  A  GOD?        51 

only  or  mainly  of  its  physical  aspects.  We  think 
of  it  as  a  great  community,  with  an  ancient,  and  in 
some  ways  admirable,  tradition  of  political  life, 
with  a  splendid  record  of  achievement  in  both  ma- 
terial and  spiritual  things,  with  a  great  past,  and 
(we  hope)  a  greater  future.  In  all  these  cases  the 
parts  have  been  fused  into  a  whole  by  human  effort, 
either  consciously  or  instinctively  applied;  and  it 
is  in  virtue  of  this  effort  alone  that  the  whole  tran- 
scends its  parts.  But  in  the  case  of  a  God  "syn- 
thetized"  out  of  the  thought  and  feeling  of  untold 
generations  of  men,  the  analogy  breaks  down  at 
every  point.  To  assume  that  portions  of  psychic 
experience  are  capable  of  vital  coalescence,  is  to 
beg  the  whole  question.  We  know  that  stone  can 
be  piled  on  stone,  that  men  can  be  trained  to  form  a 
platoon,  a  cohort,  a  phalanx;  but  that  detached 
fragments  of  mind  are  capable  of  any  sort  of  co- 
hesion and  organization  we  do  not  know  at  all. 
And,  even  if  this  point  could  be  granted,  where  is 
the  organizing  power?  We  should  have  to  postu- 
late another  God  to  serve  as  the  architect  or  the 
drill-sergeant  of  our  synthetic  divinity.  Nor  would 
it  help  matters  to  suggest  that  the  God  (as  it  were) 
crystallized  himself;  for  that  is  to  assume  structural 
potentialities  in  his  component  parts  which  must 


52 GOD  AND  MR.  WELLS 

have  come  from  somewhere,  so  that  again  we  have 
to  presuppose  another  God.  It  is  true,  no  doubt, 
that  portions  of  thought  and  feeling  can  be  col- 
lected, arranged,  edited,  in  some  sense  organized, 
by  human  effort;  but  the  result  is  an  encyclopaedia, 
a  thesaurus,  an  anthology,  a  liturgy,  a  bible — not  a 
God.  It  may,  like  the  Vedas,  the  Hebrew  Scrip- 
tures and  the  Koran,  become  an  object  of  idolatry; 
but  even  its  idolaters  see  in  it  only  an  emanation 
from  God,  not  the  God  himself.  All  this  argu- 
ment may  strike  the  reader  as  extremely  nebulous, 
but  I  submit  that  the  fault  is  not  mine.  It  was  not 
I  who  sought  to  demonstrate  the  reality  of  a  figure 
of  speech  by  placing  it  on  all  fours  with  a  cathedral 
and  a  regiment.  The  whole  contention  is  so  baf- 
fling that  reason  staggers  and  flounders  as  in  a 
quicksand.  It  rests  upon  a  mixture  of  categories, 
as  palpable  and  yet  as  elusive  as  anything  in  The 
Hunting  of  the  Snark. 

If  you  tell  me  that  Public  Opinion  is  a  God,  I 
am  quite  willing  to  consider  whether  the  metaphor 
is  a  luminous  and  helpful  one.  But  if  you  protest 
that  it  is  no  metaphor  at  all,  but  a  literal  state- 
ment of  fact,  like  the  statement  that  Mr.  Woodrow 
Wilson  is  President  of  the  United  States,  I  no 
longer  know  where  we  are.  Mr.  Wells's  "undying 


WHEN  IS  A  GOD  NOT  A  GOD?        53 

human  memory  and  increasing  human  will"  can- 
not exactly  be  identified  with  Public  Opinion,  but 
it  belongs  to  the  same  order  of  ideas.  Here  there 
is  an  actual  workable  analogy.  But  there  is  no 
practicable  analogy  between  a  purely  mental  con- 
cept and  a  physical  construction.  You  will  not 
help  me  to  believe  in  (say)  the  doctrine  of  Original 
Sin,  by  assuring  me  that  it  is  built,  like  the  Tower 
Bridge,  on  the  cantilever  principle. 

It  is  quite  certain  that,  if  passionate  conviction 
and  the  free  use  of  anthropomorphic  language  can 
make  a  figure  of  speech  a  God,  the  Invisible  King 
is  an  individual  entity,  as  detached  from  Mr.  Wells 
as  Michelangelo's  Moses  from  Michelangelo. 
Paradoxically  enough,  he  has  put  on  "individua- 
tion"  that  his  worshippers  may  escape  from  it. 
Mr.  Wells's  book  teems  with  expressions — I  have 
given  many  examples  of  them — which  are  wholly 
inapplicable  to  any  metaphor,  however  galvanized 
into  a  semblance  of  life  by  ecstatic  contemplation 
in  the  devotional  mind.  For  example,  when  we 
are  told  that  it  is  doubtful  whether  "God  knows 
all,  or  much  more  than  we  do,  about  the  ultimate 
Being,"  the  mere  assertion  of  a  doubt  implies  the 
possibility  of  knowledge  of  a  quite  different  order 
from  any  that  exists  in  the  human  intelligence. 


54  GOD  AND  MR.  WELLS 

Mr.  Wells  explicitly  assures  us  that  knowledge  of 
the  Veiled  Being  is  (for  the  present  at  any  rate) 
inaccessible  to  our  faculties;  but  he  implies  that 
such  knowledge  may  be  possessed  by  the  Invisible 
King;  and  as  knowledge  cannot  possibly  be  a  syn- 
thesis of  ignorances,  it  follows  that  the  Invisible 
King  has  powers  of  apprehension  quite  different 
from,  and  independent  of,  any  operation  of  the 
human  brain.  These  powers  may  not,  as  a  matter 
of  fact,  have  solved  the  enigma  of  existence;  but 
it  is  clearly  implied  that  they  might  conceivably 
do  so;  and  indeed  the  text  positively  asserts  that 
God  knows  something  more  of  the  Veiled  Being 
than  we  do,  though  perhaps  not  "much."  In  view 
of  this  passage,  and  many  others  of  a  like  nature, 
we  cannot  fall  back  on  the  theory  that  Mr.  Wells 
is  merely  trying,  by  dint  of  highly  imaginative 
writing,  to  infuse  life  into  a  deliberate  personifica- 
tion, like  Robespierre's  Goddess  of  Reason  or 
Matthew  Arnold's  Zeitgeist.  However  difficult  it 
may  be,  we  must  accustom  ourselves  to  the  belief 
that  his  assertions  of  the  personal  existence  of  his 
God  represent  the  efficient  element  in  his  thought, 
and  that  if  other  passages  seem  inconsistent  with 
that  idea — seem  to  point  to  mere  abstraction  or 
allegorization  of  the  mind  of  the  race — it  is  these 


WHExN  IS  A  GOD  NOT  A  GOD?        55 

passages,  and  not  the  more  full-blooded  pronounce- 
ments, that  must  be  cancelled  as  misleading  or 
inadequate.  There  can  be  no  doubt  that  the  God 
to  whom  Mr.  Wells  seeks  to  convert  us  is  (in  his 
apostle's  conception)  much  more  of  a  President 
Wilson  than  of  a  Zeitgeist. 

It  would  be  possible,  of  course,  for  a  God,  how- 
ever dubious  and  even  inconceivable  the  method  of 
his  "synthesis,"  to  manifest  himself  in  his  effects 
— to  prove  his  existence  by  his  actions.  But  this, 
as  we  have  seen,  the  Invisible  King  scorns  to  do. 
His  adherents,  we  are  told,  "advance  no  proof  what- 
ever of  the  existence  of  God  but  their  realization  of 
him"  (p.  98).  There  is  a  sort  of  implication  that 
the  Deity  will  not  descend  to  vulgar  miracle-work- 
ing. "An  evil  and  adulterous  generation  seeketh 
after  a  sign;  and  there  shall  no  sign  be  given  to  it" 
— not  even  "the  sign  of  Jonah  the  prophet." 

But  to  ask  for  some  sort  of  visible  or  plausibly 
conjecturable  effect  is  not  at  all  the  same  thing  as 
to  ask  for  miracles.  Mr.  Wells  proclaims  with  all 
his  might  that  the  Invisible  King  works  the  most 
marvellous  and  beneficent  changes  in  the  minds  of 
his  devotees;  why,  then,  do  these  changes  produce 
no  recognizable  effect  on  the  course  of  events?  The 


56 GOD  AND  MR.  WELLS 

God  who  can  work  upon  the  human  mind  has  the 
key  to  the  situation  in  his  hands — why,  then,  does 
he  make  such  scant  use  of  it?  Is  God  only  a 
luxury  for  the  intellectually  wealthy?  The  cham- 
pagne of  the  spiritual  life?  A  stimulant  and  ano- 
dyne highly  appreciated  in  the  best  circles,  but 
inaccessible  to  the  man  of  small  spiritual  means, 
whether  he  be  a  dweller  in  palaces  or  in  the  slums? 

To  say  that  a  given  Power  can  and  does  potently 
affect  the  human  mind,  and  yet  cannot,  or  at  least 
does  not,  produce  any  appreciable  or  demonstrable 
effect  on  the  external  aspects  of  human  life,  is  like 
asking  us  to  believe  that  a  man  is  a  heaven-born 
conductor  who  can  get  nothing  out  of  his  orchestra 
but  discords  and  cacophonies. 

Mr.  Wells  may  perhaps  reply  that  his  God  does 
recognizably  influence  the  course  of  events — in- 
deed, that  everything  in  history  which  we  see  to  be 
good  and  desirable  is  the  work  of  the  Invisible  King 
— but  that  he  does  not  advance  this  fact  as  a  proof 
of  God's  existence,  because  it  is  discernible  only  to 
the  eye  of  faith  and  cannot  be  brought  home  to 
unregenerate  reason.  I  do  not  imagine  that  he  will 
take  this  line,  for  it  would  come  dangerously  near 
to  identifying  God  with  Providence — a  heresy 
which  he  abhors.  But  supposing  some  other  adept 


WHEN  IS  A  GOD  NOT  A  GOD?        57 

in  "modern  religion"  were  to  make  this  claim  on 
behalf  of  the  Invisible  King,  would  it  go  any  way 
towards  persuading  us  that  we  owe  him  our  alle- 
giance? 

The  assumption  would  be,  as  I  understand  it, 
that  of  a  finite  God,  unable  to  modify  the  opera- 
tions of  matter,  but  with  an  unlimited,  or  at  any 
rate  a  very  great,  power  of  influencing  the  work- 
ings of  the  human  mind.  He  would  have  no  con- 
trol over  meteorological  conditions:  he  could  not 
"ride  in  the  whirlwind  and  direct  the  storm";  he 
could  not  subdue  the  earthquake  or  prevent  the 
Greenland  glacier  from  "calving"  icebergs  into 
the  Atlantic.  He  could  not  release  the  human  body 
from  the  rhythms  of  growth  and  decay;  he  could 
not  eradicate  that  root  of  all  evil,  the  association 
of  consciousness  with  a  mechanism  requiring  to  be 
constantly  stoked  with  a  particular  sort  of  fuel 
which  exists  only  in  limited  quantities.  If  God 
could  arrange  for  life  to  be  maintained  on  a  diet 
of  inorganic  substances — if  he  could  enable  ani- 
mals, like  plants,  to  go  direct  to  minerals  and  gases 
for  their  sustenance,  instead  of  having  it,  so  to 
speak,  half -digested  in  the  vegetable  kingdom — or 
even  if,  under  the  present  system,  he  could  make 
fecundity,  in  any  given  species,  automatically  pro- 


58 GOD  AND  MR.  WELLS 

portionate  to  the  supply  of  food — he  would  at  one 
stroke  refashion  earthly  life  in  an  extremely  desir- 
able sense.  But  this  we  assume  to  be  beyond  his 
competence:  the  Veiled  Being  has  autocratically 
imposed  the  struggle  for  existence  as  an  inexorable 
condition  of  the  Invisible  King's  activities,  except 
in  so  far  as  it  can  be  eluded  by  and  through  the 
human  intelligence.  His  problem,  then,  will  be  to 
guide  the  minds  of  men  towards  a  realization  that 
their  higher  destiny  lies  in  using  their  intelligence 
to  substitute  ordered  co-operation  for  the  san- 
guinary competition  above  which  merely  instinc- 
tive organism  are  incapable  of  rising. 

Observe  that  in  exercising  this  power  of  psychical 
influence  there  would  be  no  sort  of  miracle-work- 
ing, no  interference  with  the  order  of  nature.  The 
influence  of  mind  upon  mind,  even  without  the  in- 
tervention of  words  or  other  symbols,  is  a  part  of 
the  order  of  nature  which  no  one  to-day  dreams 
of  questioning.  Hypnotic  suggestion  is  a  depart- 
ment of  orthodox  medical  practice,  and  telepathy 
is  more  and  more  widely  admitted,  if  only  as  a 
refuge  from  the  hypothesis  of  survival  after  death. 
If,  then,  we  have  a  divine  mind  applying  itself  to 
the  problems  of  humanity,  and  capable  of  suggest- 
ing ideas  to  the  mind  of  man — appealing,  as  a  "still 


WHEN  IS  A  GOD  NOT  A  GOD?        59 

small  voice"  (p.  18),  to  his  intelligence,  his  emo- 
tions and  his  will — one  cannot  but  figure  its  power 
for  good  as  almost  illimitable.  What  is  to  pre- 
vent it  from  achieving  a  very  rapid  elimination  of 
the  ape  and  the  tiger,  the  Junker  and  the  Tory, 
and  substituting  social  enthusiasms  for  individual 
passions  as  the  motive-power  of  human  conduct? 
We  may  admit  that  the  brain  of  man  must  first 
be  developed  up  to  a  certain  point  before  divine 
suggestion  could  effectively  work  upon  it.  But  we 
know  that  men  and  races  of  magnificent  brain- 
power must  have  existed  on  the  planet  thousands 
and  thousands  of  years  ago.  What,  then,  has  the 
Invisible  King  made  of  his  opportunities? 

Frankly,  he  has  made  a  terrible  hash  of  them. 
It  is  hard  to  see  how  the  progress  of  the  race  could 
possibly  have  been  slower,  more  laborious,  more 
painful  than  in  fact  it  has  been.  No  doubt  there 
have  been  a  few  splendid  spurts,  which  we  may, 
if  we  please,  trace  to  the  genial  goading  of  the 
Invisible  King.  But  all  the  great  movements  have 
dribbled  away  into  frustration  and  impotence. 
There  was,  for  example,  the  glorious  intellectual 
efflorescence  of  Greece.  There,  you  may  say,  the 
Invisible  King  was  almost  visibly  at  work.  But, 
after  all,  what  a  flash-in-the-pan  it  was!  Hellas 


60 GOD  AND  MR.  WELLS 

was  a  little  island  of  light  surrounded  by  gloomy 
immensities  of  barbarism;  yet,  instead  of  stab- 
lishing  and  fortifying  a  political  cosmos,  its  lead- 
ing men  had  nothing  better  to  do  than  to  plunge 
into  the  bloody  chaos  of  the  Peloponnesian  War, 
and  set  back  the  clock  of  civilization  by  untold  cen- 
turies. What  was  the  Invisible  King  about  when 
that  catastrophe  happened?  Similarly,  the  past 
two  centuries,  and  especially  the  past  seventy-five 
years,  have  witnessed  a  marvellous  onrush  in  man's 
intellectual  apprehension  of  the  universe  and  mast- 
ery over  the  latent  energies  of  matter.  But  be- 
cause moral  and  political  development  has  lagged 
hopelessly  behind  material  progress,  the  world  is 
plunged  into  a  war  of  unexampled  magnitude  and 
almost  unexampled  fury,  wherein  the  heights  of 
the  air  and  depths  of  the  sea  are  pressed  into  the 
service  of  slaughter.  Where  was  the  Invisible 
King  in  July,  1914?  Or,  for  that  matter,  what  has 
he  been  doing  since  July,  1870?  "Either  he  was 
musing,  or  he  was  on  a  journey,  or  peradventure  he 
slept."  Truly  it  would  seem  that  he  might  have 
advised  Mr.  Wells  to  wait  for  the  "Cease  fire!"  be- 
fore proclaiming  his  godhead. 

Of  course  Mr.  Wells  will  remind  me  that  he 
claims  for  him  no  material  potency;  and  I  must 


WHEN  IS  A  GOD  NOT  A  GOD?        61 

own  that  no  happier  moment  could  have  been 
chosen  for  the  annunciation  of  an  impotent  God. 
But  the  plea  does  not  quite  tally  with  the  facts.  In 
the  first  place  (as  we  have  seen)  the  Invisible  King 
is  going  to  do  things — he  is  going  to  do  very  re- 
markable things  as  soon  as  he  knows  how.  And  in 
the  second  place  it  is  impossible  to  conceive  that 
the  tremendous  psychical  influence  which  is  claimed 
for  this  God  can  be  exercised  without  producing 
external  reactions.  Why,  he  is  actually  stated  to 
be — like  another  God,  his  near  relative,  whom  he 
rather  unkindly  disowns — he  is  stated  to  be  "the 
light  of  the  world"  (p.  18).  Is  there  any  mean- 
ing in  such  a  statement  if  it  be  not  pertinent  to  ask 
what  sort  of  light  has  led  the  world  into  the 
ghastly  quagmire  in  which  it  is  to-day  agonizing? 
The  truth  is  that  Mr.  Wells  attributes  to  his  God 
powers  which,  even  if  he  had  no  greater  knowl- 
edge than  Mr.  Wells  himself  possesses,  could  be 
used  to  epoch-making  advantage.  Fancy  an  omni- 
present H.  G.  Wells,  able  to  speak  in  a  still  small 
voice  to  all  men  of  good-will  throughout  the  world! 
What  a  marvellous  revolution  might  he  not  effect! 
Mr.  Wells  himself  has  outlined  such  a  revolution 
in  one  of  his  most  thoughtful  romances,  In  the 
Days  of  the  Comet.  From  the  fact  that  it  does 


62  GOD  AND  MR.  WELLS 

not  occur,  may  we  not  fairly  suspect  that  the  In- 
visible King  is  a  creation  of  the  same  mythopoeic 
faculty  which  engendered  the  wonder-working 
comet  with  its  aura  of  sweet-reasonableness? 

If  we  turn  to  Mr.  Britling,  we  find  that  that 
eminent  publicist  was  distressed  by  a  sense  of  the 
difficulty  of  conveying  God's  message  to  the  world; 
only  he  modestly  attributed  it  to  defects  in  his  own 
equipment  rather  than  to  powerlessness  on  the  part 
of  God.  We  read  on  page  427: — "Never 
had  it  been  so  plain  to  Mr.  Britling  that  he  was 
a  weak,  silly,  ill-informed  and  hasty-minded 
writer,  and  never  had  he  felt  so  invincible  a  con- 
viction that  the  Spirit  of  God  was  in  him,  and  that 
it  fell  to  him  to  take  some  part  in  the  establishment 
of  a  new  order  of  living  upon  the  earth.  .  .  .  Al- 
ways he  seemed  to  be  on  the  verge  of  some  illumi- 
nating and  beautiful  statement  of  his  cause;  always 
he  was  finding  his  writing  inadequate,  a  thin  treach- 
ery to  the  impulse  of  his  heart."  Have  we  not  in 
such  an  experience  an  irrefutable  proof  of  the  in- 
efficacy  of  Mr.  Britling's  God?  Always  the  world 
has  been  all  ears  for  a  clear,  convincing,  compulsive 
message  from  God ;  always,  or  at  any  rate  for  many 
thousands  of  years,  there  have  been  men  who 
seemed  the  predestined  mouthpieces  of  such  a 


WHEN  IS  A  GOD  NOT  A  GOD?        63 

message;  always  what  purported  to  be  the  word 
of  God  has  proved  to  be  either  powerless  to  make 
itself  heard,  or  powerful  only  to  the  begetting  of 
hideous  moral  and  social  corruptions.  God  spoke 
(it  is  said)  through  the  Vedic  rishis,  the  sages  of 
the  Himalayas — and  the  result  has  been  caste,  cow- 
worship,  suttee,  abominations  of  asceticism,  and 
nameless  orgies  of  sensuality.  God  spoke  through 
Moses,  and  the  result  was — Judaism!  God  spoke 
through  Jesus,  and  the  result  was  Arianism  and 
Athanasianism,  the  Papacy,  the  Holy  Office,  the 
Thirty  Years'  War,  massacres  beyond  computation, 
and  the  slowly  calcined  flesh  of  an  innumerable 
army  of  martyrs.  All  this,  no  doubt,  was  due  to 
gross  and  palpable  misunderstanding  of  the  mes- 
sage delivered  through  Jesus;  but  since  it  was  so 
fatally  open  to  misunderstanding,  would  it  not  bet- 
ter have  remained  undelivered?  Could  the  world 
have  been  appreciably  worse  off  without  it?  The 
question  is  rather  an  idle  one,  since  it  turns  on 
"might  have  beens."  That  the  element  of  good  in 
the  message  of  Jesus  has  been  to  some  extent  ef- 
ficient, no  one  would  deny.  But  the  alloy  of  po- 
tential evil  has  made  itself  so  overpoweringly  actual 
that  to  strike  a  balance  between  the  two  forces  is 
impossible,  and  the  question  is  generally  decided 


64 GOD  AND  MR.  WELLS 

by  throwing  a  solid  chunk  of  prejudice  into  one 
scale  or  the  other. 

There  has  never  been  a  time  when  a  really  well- 
informed  revelation,  uttered  with  charm  and 
power,  might  not  have  revolutionized  the  world. 
"A  well-informed  revelation!"  the  reader  may  cry: 
"What  terrible  bathos!"  Mr.  Wells,  moreover, 
speaks  slightingly  of  revelation  (pp.  19,  163)  in  a 
tone  that  seems  to  imply  that  "modern  religion" 
would  have  nothing  to  do  with  it  even  if  it  could. 
But  the  demand  for  a  revelation  is  eminently 
reasonable  and  justified;  and  the  only  trouble  about 
the  historic  revelations  is  that  they  have  all  been  so 
shockingly  ill-informed,  and  have  revealed  noth- 
ing to  the  purpose.  Robert  Louis  Stevenson  antici- 
pated Mr.  Wells's  view  of  the  matter  when  he 
wrote  ironically: — 

It's  a  simple  thing  that  I  demand, 

Though  humble  as  can  be — 
A  statement  fair  in  my  Maker's  hand 

To  a  gentleman  like  me  — 

A  clean  account,  writ  fair  and  broad, 

And  a  plain  apologee — 
Or  deevil  a  ceevil  word  to  God 

From  a  gentleman  like  me. 

But  why  this  irony?  What  an  infinity  of  trouble 
and  pain  would  have  been  saved  if  such  a  "clean 


WHEN  IS  A  GOD  NOT  A  GOD?        65 

account,  writ  fair  and  broad,"  had  been  vouch- 
safed, and  had  been  found  to  tally  with  the  facts! 
Nor  have  the  reputedly  wise  and  good  of  this  world 
seen  any  presumption  in  desiring  such  a  com- 
munique. Most  of  them  thought  they  had  received 
it,  and  many  wasted  half  their  lives  in  attempting 
to  reconcile  new  knowledge  with  old  ignorance, 
promulgated  under  the  guarantee  of  God.  I  can- 
not but  think  that  the  poet  got  nearer  the  heart  of 
the  matter  who  wrote: — 

Was  Moses  upon  Sinai  taught 
How  Sinai's  mighty  ribs  were  wrought? 
Did  Buddha,  'neath  the  bo-tree's  shade, 
Learn  how  the  stars  were  poised  and  swayed? 

Did  Jesus  still  pain's  raging  storm, 
And  dower  the  world  with  chloroform? 
Or  Mahomet  a  jehad  decree 
'Gainst  microbe-harboring  gnat  and  flea? 

Has  revelation  e'er  revealed 

Aught   from   its   age   and   hour   concealed? 

Or  miracle,  since  time  began, 

Conferred  a  single  boon  on  Man? 

Truly,  we  may  agree  with  Mr.  Wells  that  the 
Invisible  King  was  probably  not  in  the  secrets  of 
the  Veiled  Being,  else  he  could  scarcely  have  kept 
them  so  successfully.  But  have  we  any  use  for  a 
God  who  can  teach  us  nothing?  who  has  to  be 


66  GOD  AND  MR.  WELLS 

taught  by  us  before  he  can  do  anything  worth 
mentioning?  The  old  Gods  who  professed  to  teach 
were  much  more  rational  in  theory,  if  only  their 
teaching  had  not  been  all  wrong.  Man  has  built 
up  his  knowledge  of  the  universe  he  lives  in  by 
slow,  laborious  degrees,  not  helped,  but  constantly 
and  cruelly  hindered,  by  his  Gods.  Yet  Mr. 
Wells  will  surely  not  deny  that  an  approximately 
true  conception  of  the  process  of  nature,  and  of 
his  own  origin  and  history,  was  an  indispensable 
basis  for  all  right  and  lasting  social  construction. 
What  colossal  harm  has  been  wrought,  for  in- 
stance, by  the  fairy-tale  of  the  Fall,  and  all  its 
theological  consequences!  Yet,  age  after  age,  the 
Invisible  King  did  nothing  to  shake  its  calamitous 
prestige.  Of  late  it  is  true  that  the  progress  of 
knowledge  has  seemed  no  longer  slow,  but 
amazingly  rapid;  but  that  is  because  the  amount 
of  energy  devoted  to  it  has  been  multiplied  a  hun- 
dredfold. Each  new  step  is  still  a  very  short  one: 
it  is  generally  found  that  several  investigators  have 
independently  arrived  at  the  verge  of  a  new  dis- 
covery, and  it  is  often  a  matter  of  chance  which 
of  them  first  crosses  the  line  and  is  lucky  enough 
to  associate  his  name  with  the  completed  achieve- 
ment. All  this  means  that  to-day,  as  from  the  be- 


WHEN  IS  A  GOD  NOT  A  GOD?        67 

ginning,  man  has  to  wring  her  secrets  from  Nature 
in  the  sweat  of  his  brain,  and  without  the  smallest 
assistance  from  any  Invisible  King  or  other  poten- 
tate. To-day  there  are  doubtless  beneficent  secrets 
under  our  very  noses,  so  to  speak,  which  one  word 
of  a  still  small  voice  might  enable  us  to  grasp,  but 
which  may  remain  undiscovered,  to  our  great  detri- 
ment, for  centuries  to  come.  There  is,  in  short,  no 
single  point,  either  in  history  or  in  contemporary 
life,  where  "the  light  of  the  world"  can  be  shown, 
or  plausibly  conjectured,  to  have  lighted  us  to  any 
practical  purpose.  And  it  is  futile  to  urge,  I  re- 
peat, that  it  could  not  have  done  so  without  a  mirac- 
ulous disturbance  of  the  order  of  nature.  The  in- 
fluence of  mind  upon  mind,  however  conveyed,  is 
the  most  natural  thing  in  the  world;  and,  short  of 
transplanting  mountains,  inhibiting  earthquakes, 
and  teaching  people  to  subsist  on  air,  there  is  noth- 
ing that  mind  cannot  do. 

Besides,  when  we  come  to  think  of  it,  why  this 
prejudice  against  miracles?  Why  is  Mr.  Wells  so 
sternly  opposed  to  the  bare  idea  of  Providence? 
"Fear  and  feebleness,"  he  says,  "go  straight  to  the 
Heresies  that  God  is  Magic  or  that  God  is  Provi- 
dence" (p.  27) — as  though  it  were  disgracefully 
pusillanimous  to  prefer  a  well-governed  to  an  un- 


68 GOD  AND  MR.  WELLS 

governed  world.  God,  in  the  ordinary  sense  of  the 
word,  the  sense  we  all  understand,  is  unquestion- 
ably magic,  whether  we  like  it  or  not.  He  is  none 
the  less  magic  because  he  works  through  one  great 
spell,  and  not  through  a  host  of  minor,  petti-fog- 
ging miracles.  Upon  the  matter  of  fact  we  are 
all  agreed,  Mr.  Chesterton  only  dissenting;  but  Mr. 
Wells  writes  as  if  it  were  an  essentially  godlike 
thing,  and  greatly  to  the  credit  of  any  and  every 
God,  to  give  Nature  its  head,  and  take  no  further 
trouble  about  the  matter.  I  cannot  share  that 
view.  My  only  objection  to  Providence  is  that  it 
manifestly  does  not  exist.  If  it  did  exist,  and 
made  the  world  an  appreciably  better  place  to  live 
in,  why  should  we  grudge  it  a  few  miracles? 
There  is  a  touch  of  the  sour-grapes  philosophy  in 
the  rationalist  attitude  on  this  matter  which  Mr. 
Wells  attributes  to  his  Invisible  King.  Because 
we  can't  have  any  miracles,  we  say  we  don't  want 
them.  Also,  no  doubt,  we  see  that  the  alleged  mir- 
acles of  the  past  were  childish  futilities,  doing  at 
most  a  little  temporary  good  to  individuals,  never 
rendering  any  permanent  service  to  a  city  or  a 
nation,  and  much  less  to  mankind  at  large.  They 
were  a  sort  of  niggardly  alms  from  omnipotence, 
not  a  generous  endowment  or  a  liberal  compensa- 


WHEN  IS  A  GOD  NOT  A  GOD?        69 

tion.  But  is  that  any  reason  why  an  intelligent 
Power  should  be  unable  to  devise  a  really  helpful 
miracle?  Another  plausible  objection  is  that,  even 
if  we  could  admit  the  justice  of  a  system  of  rewards 
and  punishments,  good  and  evil  are  so  inextricably 
intermixed  in  this  world  that  it  is  impossible  to 
distribute  benefits  on  a  satisfactory  moral  scheme. 
It  is  impossible  to  manipulate  the  rainfall  so  that 
the  righteous  farmer  shall  have  just  what  he  wants 
at  the  appropriate  seasons,  while  his  wicked  neigh- 
bour suffers  from  alternate  drought  and  floods;  nor 
can  it  be  arranged  that  the  midday  express  shall 
convey  all  the  good  people  safely,  while  the  4.15, 
which  is  wrecked,  carries  none  but  undesirable  char- 
acters. To  this  it  might  be  replied  that  the  in- 
conceivable complexity  of  the  chess-board  of  the 
world  exists  only  in  relation  to  our  human  faculties; 
but  what  is  far  more  to  the  point  is  the  indubitable 
fact  that  many  salutary  miracles  might  be  wrought 
which  would  raise  no  question  whatever  as  to  the 
moral  merits  or  defects  of  the  beneficiaries.  Mir- 
acles of  alleged  justice  may  reasonably  be  depre- 
cated; but  where  is  the  objection  to  miracles  of 
mercy,  falling,  like  the  blessed  rain  from  heaven, 
on  both  just  and  unjust? 

The  haughty  soul  of  Mr.  Wells  may  prefer  a 


70 GOD  AND  MR.  WELLS 

deity  who  offers  us  no  tangible  bribes — who  not 
only  does  not  work  miracles,  but  will  not  even 
utilize  to  material  ends  that  great  system  of  wire- 
less telegraphy  between  his  mind  and  ours  which 
he  has,  by  hypothesis,  at  his  disposal.  Mine,  I 
confess,  is  a  humbler  spirit.  I  should  be  perfectly 
willing  to  accept  even  thaumaturgic  benefits  if  only 
they  came  in  my  way;  and  I  cannot  regard  it  as  a 
merit  in  a  God  that  he  should  carefully  abstain 
from  using  even  his  powers  of  suggestion  to  do 
some  practical  good  in  the  world,  and,  incidentally, 
to  demonstrate  his  own  existence. 

It  is  difficult,  in  the  course  of  a  long  discussion, 
to  keep  the  attention  fixed  on  the  precise  point  at 
issue.  I  therefore  sum  up  in  a  few  words  the 
argument  of  this  chapter. 

In  the  first  place,  I  have  shown  that,  if  words 
mean  anything,  Mr.  Wells  does  actually  wish  us 
to  believe  that  his  God  is  not  a  figure  of  speech, 
but  a  person,  an  individual,  as  real  and  independ- 
ent an  entity  as  the  Kaiser  or  President  Wilson. 
In  the  second  place,  I  have  enquired  whether  any- 
thing he  says  enables  us  to  conceive  a  priori  the 
possibility  of  such  an  entity  disengaging  itself  from 


WHEN  IS  A  GOD  NOT  A  GOD?        71 

the  mind  of  the  race,  and  have  regretfully  been 
led  to  the  conclusion  that  the  genesis  of  this  God 
remains  at  least  as  insoluble  a  mystery  as  that  of  any 
other  God  ever  placed  before  a  confiding  public. 
Thirdly,  I  have  approached  the  question  a  posteriori 
and  enquired  whether  history  or  present  experience 
offers  any  evidence  from  which  we  can  reasonably 
infer  the  existence  and  activity  of  such  a  God — ar- 
riving once  more  at  a  negative  conclusion.  With 
the  best  will  in  the  world,  I  can  discover  nothing  in 
this  Invisible  King  but  a  sort  of  new  liqueur — or 
old  liqueur  with  a  new  label — suited,  no  doubt,  to 
the  constitutions  of  certain  very  exceptional  peo- 
ple. Mr.  Wells  avers  that  he  himself  finds  it  su- 
premely grateful  and  comforting,  and  further  ap- 
peals to  the  testimony  of  a  number  of  other 
(unnamed)  believers — "English,  Americans,  Ben- 
galis, Russians,  French  .  .  .  Positivists,  Baptists, 
Sikhs,  Mohammedans"  (p.  4) — a  quaint  Pente- 
costal gathering.  It  is  true,  of  course,  that  the 
proof  of  the  pudding  is  in  the  eating,  and  of  the 
liqueur  in  the  drinking.  But  some  of  us  are  in- 
veterately  sceptical  of  the  virtues  of  alcohol,  even 
in  non-intoxicant  doses,  and  are  apt  to  think  that 
the  man  who  discovers  a  remedy  for  sea-sickness 


72 GOD  AND  MR.  WELLS 

or  a  prophylactic  against  typhoid  is  a  greater  bene- 
factor of  the  race  than  a  God  whose  special  char- 
acteristic it  is  to  be  not  only  invisible  himself  but 
equally  imperceptible  in  his  workings. 


VI 

FOR  AND  AGAINST   PERSONIFICATION 

FOR  those  of  us  who  cannot  accept  Mr. 
Wells's  Invisible  King  as  a  God  in  any 
useful  or  even  comprehensible  sense  of 
the  term,  there  remains  the  question  whether  he  is 
a  useful  figure  of  speech.  Metaphors  and  personi- 
fications are  often  things  of  great  potency,  whether 
for  good  or  evil.  It  might  quite  well  happen  that, 
if  we  wholly  rejected  Mr.  Wells's  gospel,  on  ac- 
count of  a  mere  squabble  as  to  the  meaning  of  the 
word  "God,"  we  should  thereby  lose  something 
which  might  have  been  of  the  utmost  value  to  us. 
Let  us  not  run  the  risk  of  throwing  out  the  baby  with 
the  bath-water. 

Take  the  case  of  a  very  similar  personification 
with  which  we  are  all  familiar — to  wit,  John  Bull. 
Is  he  a  helpful  or  a  detrimental  "synthesis"?  It 
is  not  quite  easy  to  say.  There  is  a  certain 
geniality,  a  bluff  wholesomeness,  a  downright  hon- 
esty about  him,  which  has  doubtless  its  value; 

73 


74  GOD  AND  MR.  WELLS 

but  on  the  other  hand  he  is  the  incarnation  of 
Philistinism  and  Toryism,  the  perfect  expression 
of  the  average  sensual  man.  I  am  told  that  in 
one  of  his  avatars  he  has  something  like  two  mil- 
lion worshippers,  on  whom  his  influence  is  of  the 
most  questionable,  precisely  because  they  have  im- 
plicit "faith"  in  him,  and  regard  him  as  a  "Friend 
behind  phenomena,"  a  "great  brother,"  a  "strongly 
marked  and  knowable  personality,  loving,  inspir- 
ing, and  lovable."  That  is  an  illustration  of  the 
dangers  which  may  lurk  in  prosopopoeia.  But  in 
the  main  we  can  regard  John  Bull  without  too  much 
misgiving,  because  we  cannot  regard  him  seriously. 
His  worship  will  always  be  seasoned  with  the  sav- 
ing grace  of  humor.  He  can  do  service  in  two 
capacities — sometimes  as  an  ideal,  often  as  a  de- 
terrent. Whatever  religious  revolutions  may  await 
us,  we  are  not  likely  to  see  St.  Paul's  Cathedral 
solemnly  re-dedicated  to  the  worship  of  John  Bull. 
He  and  his  sister  divinity,  Mrs.  Grundy,  have  never 
lacked  adorers  in  that  basilica;  but  their  cult  is 
probably  not  on  the  increase. 

The  Invisible  King,  on  the  other  hand,  is  a  per- 
sonage to  be  taken  with  the  utmost  seriousness. 
If  he  has  anything  like  the  success  Mr.  Wells  an- 
ticipates for  him,  it  is  quite  on  the  cards  that  he 


PERSONIFICATION 75 

might  oust  the  present  Reigning  Family  from  one 
or  all  of  the  cathedrals.  It  is  true  that  Mr.  Wells 
deprecates  any  ritual  worship;  but  "religious 
thought  finely  expressed"  would  always  be  in  or- 
der; and  he  "does  not  see  why  there  should  not 
be,  under  God,  associations  for  building  cathedrals 
and  such  like  great  still  places  urgent  with  beauty, 
into  which  men  and  women  may  go  to  rest  from 
the  clamor  of  the  day's  confusions"  (p.  168).  If 
cathedrals  may  be  built,  all  the  more  clearly  may 
they  be  appropriated — if  you  can  convert  or  evict 
the  dean  and  chapter.  If  the  Invisible  King  should 
take  the  fancy  of  the  nation  and  the  world,  as  Mr. 
Wells  would  have  us  think  that  he  is  already  doing, 
he  is  bound  to  become  the  object  of  a  formal  cult. 
We  shall  very  soon  see  a  prayer-book  of  the  "mod- 
ern religion"  with  marriage,  funeral  and  perhaps 
baptismal  services,  with  daily  lessons,  and  with 
suitable  forms  of  prayer  for  persons  who  cannot 
trust  themselves  to  extempore  communings  even 
with  a  "great  brother." 

Well,  there  might  be  no  great  harm  in  this. 
Some  solemn  form  for  the  expression  of  cosmic, 
and  even  of  mundane  or  political,  emotion  would 
doubtless  be  useful;  and  if  the  "modern  religion" 
could  be  saved  from  degenerating  into  a  hysterical 


76 GOD  AND  MR.  WELLS 

superstition  on  the  one  hand,  or  a  petrified,  perse- 
cuting orthodoxy  on  the  other,  it  would  certainly  be 
a  vast  improvement  on  many  of  the  religions  of 
to-day. 

But  the  ambitions  of  the  Invisible  King  go  far 
beyond  the  mere  presidency  of  an  Ethical  Church 
on  an  extended  scale.  He  is  to  be  a  King  and  no 
mistake;  not  even  a  King  of  Kings,  but  "sole 
Monarch  of  the  universal  earth."  Autocracies, 
oligarchies,  and  democracies  are  alike  to  be  swept 
out  of  his  path.  The  "implicit  command"  of  the 
modern  religion  "to  all  its  adherents  is  to  make 
plain  the  way  to  the  world  theocracy"  (p.  97). 
How  the  fiats  of  the  Invisible  King  are  to  be  issued, 
we  are  not  informed.  If  through  the  ballot-box — 
"vox  populi,  vox  dei" — then  the  distinction  be- 
tween theocracy  and  democracy  will  scarcely  be 
apparent  to  the  naked  eye.  And  one  does  not  see 
how,  in  the  transition  stage  at  any  rate,  recourse  to 
the  ballot-box  is  to  be  avoided,  if  only  as  a  lesser 
evil  than  recourse  to  howitzers,  tanks  and  subma- 
rines. We  read  that  "if  you  do  not  feel  God  then 
there  is  no  persuading  you  of  him";  but  if  you 
do,  "you  will  realize  more  and  more  clearly,  that 
thus  and  thus  and  no  other  is  his  method  and  in- 
tention" (p.  98).  Now,  assuming  (no  slight  as- 


PERSONIFICATION 77 

sumption)  that  the  oracles  of  God,  the  message  of 
the  still  small  voice,  will  be  identically  interpreted 
by  all  believers,  the  unbelievers,  those  who  "do  not 
feel  God,"  have  still  to  be  dealt  with;  and,  as 
they  are  not  open  to  persuasion,  it  would  seem  that 
the  faithful  must  be  prepared  either  to  shoot  them 
down  or  to  vote  them  down — whereof  the  latter 
seems  the  humaner  alternative.  It  is  true  that  Mr. 
Wells's  God  is  a  man  of  war;  like  that  other  whom 
he  disowns  but  strangely  resembles,  "he  brings 
mankind  not  rest  but  a  sword"  (p.  96).  But  we 
may  confidently  hold  that  this,  at  any  rate,  is  but 
a  manner  of  speaking.  Even  if  the  God  is  real, 
his  sword  is  metaphoric.  Mr.  Wells  is  not  seri- 
ously proposing  to  take  his  cue  from  his  Moham- 
medan friends,  raise  the  cry  of  "Allahu  Akbar!" 
and  propagate  his  gospel  scimitar  in  hand.  It  is 
hard  to  see,  then,  what  other  method  there  can  be  of 
dealing  with  the  heathen,  except  the  method  of  the 
ballot-box — of  course  with  proportional  representa- 
tion. When  there  are  no  more  heathen — when  the 
whole  world  can  read  the  will  of  God  by  direct  in- 
tuition, as  though  it  were  written  in  letters  of  fire 
across  the  firmament — then,  indeed,  the  ballot-box 
may  join  the  throne,  sceptre  and  crown  in  the  his- 
torical museum.  But  even  the  robust  optimism  of 


78 GOD  AND  MR.  WELLS 

the  gottestrunken  Mr.  Wells  can  scarcely  conceive 
this  millennium  to  be  at  hand.  So  that  in  the 
meantime  it  seems  unwise  to  speak  slightingly  of 
democracy,  lest  we  thereby  help  the  Powers,  both 
here  and  elsewhere,  which  are  fighting  for  some- 
thing very  much  worse.  For  I  take  it  that  the  worst 
enemy  of  the  Wellsian  God  is  the  Superman,  who 
has  quite  a  sporting  chance  of  coming  out  on  top, 
if  not  actually  in  this  War,  at  least  in  the  welter 
that  will  succeed  it. 

But  seriously,  is  any  conceivable  sort  of  theoc- 
racy a  desirable  ideal?  Or,  to  put  the  same  ques- 
tion in  more  general  terms,  is  it  wise  of  Mr.  Wells 
to  make  such  play  with  the  word  "God"?  He 
himself  admits  that  "God  trails  with  him  a  thousand 
misconceptions  and  bad  associations:  his  alleged 
infinite  nature,  his  jealousy,  his  strange  prefer- 
ences, his  vindictive  Old  Testament  past"  (p.  8)  — 
and,  it  may  fairly  be  added,  his  blood-boltered, 
Kultur-stained  present.  Is  it  possible  to  deodorize 
a  word  which  comes  to  us  redolent  of  "good,  thick 
stupefying  incense-smoke,"  mingled  with  the  reek 
of  the  auto-da-fe?  Can  we  beat  into  a  plough- 
share the  sword  of  St.  Bartholomew,  and  a  thou- 
sand other  deeds  of  horror?  God  has  been  by  far 
the  most  tragic  word  in  the  whole  vocabulary  of 


PERSONIFICATION  79 

the  race — a  spell  to  conjure  up  all  the  worst  fiends 
in  human  nature:  arrogance  and  abjectness,  fana- 
ticism, hatred  and  atrocity.  Religious  reformers — 
with  Jesus  at  their  head — have  time  and  again 
tried  to  divest  it  of  some,  at  least,  of  its  terrors, 
but  they  have  invariably  failed.  Will  Mr.  Wells 
succeed  any  better?  Is  it  not  apparent  in  the  fore- 
going discussion  that,  even  if  the  word  had  no 
other  demerits,  it  leads  us  into  regions  in  which 
the  mind  can  find  no  firm  foothold?  I  have  done 
my  best  to  accept  Mr.  Wells's  definitions,  but  I 
am  sure  he  feels  that  I  have  constantly  slipped 
from  the  strait  and  narrow  path.  Has  he  him- 
self always  kept  to  it?  I  think  not.  And,  waiving 
that  point,  is  it  at  all  likely  that  people  in  general 
will  be  more  successful  than  I  have  been  in  grasp- 
ing and  holding  fast  to  the  differentiating  attri- 
butes of  Mr.  Wells's  divinity?  If  the  word  is  at 
best  a  confusion  and  at  worst  a  war-whoop,  should 
we  not  try  to  dispense  with  it,  to  avoid  it,  to  find 
a  substitute  which  should  more  accurately,  if  less 
truculently,  express  our  idea?  Is  it  wise  or  kind 
to  seek  to  impose  on  the  future  an  endless  struggle 
with  its  sinister  ambiguities? 

There  are,  no  doubt,  regions  of  thought  from 
which  it  is  extremely  difficult  to  exclude  the  word; 


80 GOD  AND  MR.  WELLS 

but  these,  fortunately,  are  regions  in  which  it  is 
almost  necessarily  divested  of  its  historical  asso- 
ciations. As  a  term  of  pure  philosophy,  if  safe- 
guarded by  careful  definition,  it  is  a  convenient 
piece  of  shorthand,  obviating  the  necessity  for  a 
constant  recourse  to  cumbrous  formulas.  But  poli- 
tics is  not  one  of  these  regions  of  thought;  and  it  is 
precisely  in  politics  that  the  intervention  of  God 
has  from  of  old  been  most  disastrous.  "Theoc- 
racy" has  always  been  the  synonym  for  a  bleak 
and  narrow,  if  not  a  fierce  and  blood-stained, 
tyranny.  Why  seek  to  revive  and  rehabilitate  a 
word  of  such  a  dismal  connotation?  I  suggest  that 
even  if  the  Invisible  King  were  a  God,  it  would  be 
tactful  to  pretend  that  he  was  not.  As  he  is  not  a 
God,  in  any  generally  understood  sense  of  the 
term,  it  seems  a  curious  perversity  to  pretend  that 
he  is. 

Even  in  the  region  of  morals  it  is  a  backward 
step  to  restore  God  to  the  supremacy  from  which 
he  has  with  the  utmost  difficulty  been  deposed.  I 
am  sure  Mr.  Wells  does  not  in  his  heart  believe 
that  any  theological  sanction  is  required  for  the 
plain  essentials  of  social  well-doing,  or  any  theo- 
logical stimulus  for  the  rare  sublimities  of  virtue. 


PERSONIFICATION 81 

Incalculable  mischief  has  been  wrought  by  the 
clerical  endeavour  to  set  up  a  necessary  association 
between  right  conduct  and  orthodoxy,  between 
heterodoxy  and  vice.  This  Mr.  Wells  knows  as 
well  as  I  do;  yet  he  can  use  such  phrases  as  "With- 
out God,  the  'Service  of  Man'  is  no  better  than  a 
hobby  or  a  sentimentality  or  a  hypocrisy."  No 
doubt  he  has  carefully  explained  that  he  does  not 
mean  by  God  or  religion  what  the  clergy  mean; 
but  can  he  be  sure  that  by  imitating  their  phrases 
he  may  not  imperceptibly  slide  into  their  frame  of 
mind?  or  at  any  rate  tempt  the  weaker  brethren 
to  do  so?  In  using  such  an  expression  he  comes 
perilously  near  the  attitude  adopted  by  the  Bishop 
of  London  in  a  recent  address  to  the  sailors  of  the 
Grand  Fleet.  His  Lordship  told  his  hearers — we 
have  it  on  his  own  authority — that  "there  was  in 
everyone  a  good  man  and  a  bad  man.  And  I  have 
not  known  a  case,"  he  added,  "where  the  good 
man  conquered  the  bad  man  without  religion." 
Can  there  be  any  doubt  that  the  Bishop  was  either 
telling — well,  not  the  truth — or  shamelessly  play- 
ing with  words?  Of  course  it  may  be  said  that 
any  man  who  keeps  his  lower  instincts  in  control 
does  so  by  aid  of  a  feeling  that  there  are  higher 
values  in  life  than  sensual  gratification  or  direct 


82 GOD  AND  MR.  WELLS 

self -gratification  of  any  sort;  and  we  may,  if  we 
are  so  minded,  call  this  feeling  religion.  But  it 
is  a  very  inconvenient  meaning  to  attach  to  the 
word,  and  we  cannot  take  it  to  be  the  meaning 
the  Bishop  had  in  view.  What  he  meant,  in  all 
probability — what  he  desired  his  simple-minded 
hearers  to  understand — was  that  he  had  never 
known  a  good  man  who  did  not  believe,  if  not  in 
all  the  dogmas  of  the  Church  of  England,  at  any 
rate  in  the  Christian  Trinity,  the  fall  of  man,  re- 
demption from  sin,  and  the  inspiration  of  the 
Scriptures.  He  meant  that  no  man  could  be  good 
who  did  not  believe  that  God  has  given  us  in  writ- 
ing a  synopsis  of  his  plan  of  world-government, 
and  has  himself  sojourned  on  earth  and  submitted 
to  an  appearance  of  death,  some  two  thousand 
years  ago,  in  fulfilment  of  the  said  plan.  If  he  did 
not  mean  that,  he  was,  I  repeat,  playing  with 
words  and  deceiving  his  hearers,  who  would  cer- 
tainly understand  him  to  mean  something  to  that 
effect;  and  if  he  did  mean  that,  he  departed  very 
palpably  from  the  truth.  The  Bishop  of  London 
is  no  recluse,  shut  up  in  a  monastery  among  men 
of  his  own  faith.  He  is  a  man  of  the  modern 
world,  and  he  must  know,  and  know  that  he  knows, 
scores  of  men  as  good  as  himself  who  have  no  be- 


PERSONIFICATION 83 

lief  in  anything  that  he  would  recognize  as  re- 
ligion. Perhaps  he  was  not  directly  conscious  of 
telling  a  falsehood,  for  "faith"  plays  such  havoc 
with  the  intellect  that  men  cease  to  attach  any  living 
meaning  to  words,  and  come  to  deal  habitually  in 
those  unrealized  phrases  which  we  call  cant.  But 
whatever  may  have  been  his  excuses  to  his  con- 
science, he  was  saying  a  very  noxious  thing  to  the 
simple,  gallant  souls  who  heard  him.  Many  of 
them  must  have  been  well  aware  that  they  had  no 
faith  that  would  have  satisfied  the  Bishop  of  Lon- 
don, and  that  whatever  religious  ideas  lurked  in 
their  minds  were  of  very  little  use  to  them  in  strug- 
gling with  the  temptations  of  a  sailor's  life. 
Where  was  the  sense  in  telling  them  that  the  ordi- 
nary motives  which  make  for  good  conduct — 
prudence,  self-respect,  loyalty,  etc.,  etc. — are  of  no 
avail,  and  that  they  must  inevitably  be  bad  men  if 
they  had  not  "found  religion"?  If  such  talk  does 
no  positive  harm,  it  is  only  because  men  have  learnt 
to  discount  the  patter  of  theology.  Yet  here  we 
find  Mr.  Wells,  after  vigorously  disclaiming  any 
participation  in  the  Bishop's  beliefs,  falling  into 
the  common  form  of  episcopal  patter,  and  telling 
me,  for  example — a  benighted  but  quite  well-in- 
tentioned heathen — that  I  can  do  no  good  in  my 


84 GOD  AND  MR.  WELLS 

generation  unless  I  believe  in  a  God  whom  he  and 
a  number  of  Eastern  sages,  Parthians,  Medes, 
Elamites  and  dwellers  in  Mesopotamia,  have  re- 
cently "  synthetized"  out  of  their  inner  conscious- 
nesses! It  is  not  Mr.  Wells's  fault  if  I  do  not  aban- 
don the  steep  and  thorny  track  of  austerity  which  I 
have  hitherto  pursued,  invest  all  my  spare  cash 
either  in  whiskey  or  in  whiskey  shares,  and  go  for 
my  philosophy  in  future  to  the  inspiring  author  of 
Musings  without  Method  in  "Blackwood." 

It  is  not  quite  clear  why  Mr.  Wells  should  accept 
so  large  a  part  of  the  Christian  ethic  and  yet  re- 
fuse to  identify  his  Invisible  King  with  Christ. 
One  would  have  supposed  it  quite  as  easy  to  divest 
the  Christ-figure  of  any  inconvenient  attributes  as 
to  eliminate  omniscience  and  omnipotence  from 
the  God-idea.  Mr.  Wells  constantly  allows  his 
thoughts  to  run  into  the  stereotype  moulds  of 
biblical  phraseology.  We  have  seen  how  he  talks 
of  "the  still  small  voice,"  of  "the  light  of  the 
world,"  "taking  the  sting  from  death"  and  of  God 
coming  "in  his  own  time"  and  bringing  "not  rest 
but  a  sword."  To  those  instances  may  be  added 
such  phrases  as  "death  will  be  swallowed  up  in 
victory"  (p.  39),  "by  the  grace  of  the  true  God" 
(p.  44),  "God  is  Love"  (p.  65),  "the  Son  of  Man" 


PERSONIFICATION 85 

(p.  86),  "I  become  my  brother's  keeper"  (p.  97), 
"he  it  is  who  can  deliver  us  'from  the  body  of  this 
death'"  (p.  99).  But  the  clearest  indication  of 
Christian  influence  is  to  be  found  in  Mr.  Wells's 
unhesitating  and  emphatic  adoption  of  the  idea  that 
"Salvation  is  indeed  to  lose  oneself  (p.  73). 
"The  difference,"  he  says,  "between  ...  the  un- 
believer and  the  servant  of  the  true  God  is  this  .  .  . 
that  the  latter  has  experienced  a  complete  turning 
away  from  self.  This  only  difference  is  all  the 
difference  in  the  world"  (p.  84).  It  is  curious 
what  a  fascination  this  turn  of  phrase  has  exercised 
upon  many  and  diverse  intelligences.  Mr.  Bernard 
Shaw,  for  instance,  adopts  it  with  enthusiasm. 
Henrik  Ibsen — if  it  is  ever  possible  to  tie  a  true 
dramatist  down  to  a  doctrine — preaches  in  Peer 
Gynt  that  "to  be  thyself  is  to  slay  thyself."  Mr. 
Wells  has  a  cloud  of  witnesses  to  back  him  up ;  and 
yet  it  is  very  doubtful  whether  the  turn  of  phrase 
is  a  really  helpful  one — whether  it  does  not  rather 
get  in  the  way  of  the  natural  man  in  his  quest  for  a 
sound  rule  of  life. 

It  is  a  commonplace  that  the  entirely  self-centred 
man — the  Robinson  Crusoe  of  a  desert  island  of 
egoism — is  unhappy.  At  least  if  he  is  not  he 
belongs  to  a  low  intellectual  and  moral  type:  the 


86 GOD  AND  MR.  WELLS 

proof  being  that  all  development  above  the  level  of 
the  oyster  and  the  slug  has  involved  more  or  less 
surrender  of  the  immediate  claims  of  "number 
one"  to  some  larger  unity.  Progress  has  always 
consisted,  and  still  consists,  in  the  widening  of  the 
ideal  concept  which  appeals  to  our  loyalty.  Is  it 
not  Mr.  Wells's  endeavour  in  this  very  book  to  claim 
our  devotion  for  the  all-embracing  and  ultimate 
ideal — the  human  race?  So  far,  we  are  all  at  one. 
But  when  we  are  told  that  "conversion"  or  "salva- 
tion" consists  in  a  "complete  turning  away  from 
self,"  common  sense  revolts.  It  is  not  true  either 
in  every-day  life  or  in  larger  matters  of  conduct. 
In  every-day  life  the  incurably  "unselfish"  person 
is  an  intolerable  nuisance.  Here  the  common-sense 
rule  is  very  simple :  you  have  no  right  to  seek  your 
own  "salvation,"  or,  in  non-theological  terms,  your 
own  self -approval,  at  the  cost  of  other  people's;  you 
have  no  business  to  offer  sacrifices  which  the  other 
party  ought  not  to  accept.  It  is  true  that  in  the 
application  of  this  simple  rule  difficult  problems 
may  arise;  but  a  little  tact  will  generally  go  a  long 
way  towards  solving  them.  In  these  matters  an 
ounce  of  tact  is  worth  a  pound  of  casuistry.  And 
in  our  every-day  England,  in  all  classes,  it  is  my 
profound  conviction  that  a  reasonable  selflessness 


PERSONIFICATION 87 

is  very  far  from  uncommon,  very  far  from  being 
confined  to  the  "converted"  of  any  religion.  For 
forty  years  I  have  watched  it  growing  and  spread- 
ing before  my  very  eyes.  Reading  the  other  way 
The  Roundabout  Papers,  I  was  greatly  struck  by 
the  antiquated  cast  of  the  manners  therein  de- 
scribed. Of  course  Thackeray,  in  his  day,  was  re- 
puted a  cynic,  and  supposed  to  have  an  over-par- 
tiality for  studying  the  seamy  side  of  things.  But 
even  if  that  had  been  true  (which  I  do  not  believe) 
it  would  not  have  accounted  for  all  the  difference 
between  the  world  he  saw  and  that  in  which  we 
move  to-day.  I  suggest,  then,  that  so  far  as  the 
minor  moralities  are  concerned,  no  new  religion  is 
required,  and  we  have  only  to  let  things  pursue  their 
natural  trend. 

And  what  of  the  great  selflessnesses?  What  of 
the  ideal  loyalties?  What  of  the  long-accumulated 
instincts  which  tell  a  man,  in  tones  which  brook 
no  contradiction,  that  the  shortest  life  and  the 
cruellest  death  are  better  than  the  longest  life  of 
sensual  self -contempt?  Here,  as  it  seems  to  me, 
Mr.  Wells's  apostolate  of  a  new  religion  is  very 
conspicuously  superfluous — much  more  so  than  it 
would  have  been  five  years  ago.  For  have  not  he 
and  I  been  privileged  to  witness  one  of  the  most 


88  GOD  AND  MR.  WELLS 

beautiful  sights  that  the  world  ever  saw — the  flock- 
ing of  Young  England,  in  its  hundreds  upon  hun- 
dreds of  thousands,  to  endure  the  extremity  of 
hardship  and  face  the  high  probability  of  a  cruel 
death,  not  for  England  alone,  not  even  for  Eng- 
land, France  and  Belgium,  but  for  what  they  ob- 
scurely but  very  potently  felt  to  be  the  highest  in- 
terests of  the  very  same  ideal  entity  which  Mr. 
Wells  proposes  to  our  devotion — the  human  race? 
I  am  sure  he  would  be  the  last  to  minimize  the 
significance  of  that  splendid  uprising.  No  doubt 
there  were  other  motives  at  work:  in  some,  the  mere 
love  of  change  and  adventure;  in  others,  the  pres- 
sure of  public  opinion.  But  my  own  observation 
assures  me  that,  on  the  whole,  these  unideal  motives 
played  a  very  small  part.  The  young  men  simply 
felt  that  he  who  held  back  was  unfaithful  to  his 
fathers  and  unworthy  of  his  sons;  and  they  "turned 
away  from  self"  without  a  moment's  hesitation, 
and  streamed  to  the  colors  with  all  the  more  eager- 
ness the  longer  the  casualty-lists  grew,  and  the  more 
clearly  the  horrors  they  had  to  face  were  brought 
home  to  them.  Has  there  been  any  voluntary 
"slaying  of  self"  on  so  huge  a  scale  since  the  world 
began?  I  have  not  heard  of  it.  And  Mr.  Wells 
will  scarcely  tell  me  that  these  young  men  went 


PERSONIFICATION 89 

through  the  experiences  he  describes  as  "conver- 
sion," and  escaped  from  the  burden  of  "over-indi- 
viduation"  by  throwing  themselves  into  the  arms  of 
a  synthetic  God!  Many  of  them,  no  doubt,  would 
have  expressed  their  idealism,  had  they  expressed 
it  at  all,  in  terms  of  Christianity;  but  that,  we  are 
told,  is  a  delusion,  and  the  only  true  God  is  the  In- 
visible King.  If  that  be  so,  the  conclusion  would 
seem  to  be  that,  in  the  present  stage  of  the  evolu- 
tion of  human  character,  no  God  at  all  is  needed  to 
enable  millions  of  men,  in  whom  the  blood  runs 
high  and  the  joy  of  life  is  at  its  keenest,  to  achieve 
the  conquest  of  self  in  one  of  its  noblest  forms. 
Or  (what  comes  to  the  same  thing)  any  sort  of  God 
will  serve  the  purpose.  Your  God  (divested  of 
metaphysical  attributes)  is  simply  a  name  for  your 
own  better  instincts  and  impulses.  Many  people, 
perhaps  most,  share  Mr.  Wells's  tendency  to  ex- 
ternalize, objectivate,  personify  these  impulses;  and 
there  may  be  no  harm  in  doing  so.  But  when  it 
comes  to  asserting  that  your  own  personification  is 
the  only  true  one,  then — I  am  not  so  sure. 

Finally  there  arises  the  question  whether  the 
personification  of  the  Invisible  King  can  really,  in 
any  comprehensible  sense,  and  for  any  consider- 
able number  of  normal  human  beings,  rob  death 


90  GOD  AND  MR.  WELLS 

of  its  sting,  the  grave  of  its  victory?  On  this 
point  discussion  cannot  possibly  be  conclusive,  for 
the  ultimate  test  is  necessarily  a  personal  one.  If 
any  sane  and  sincere  person  tells  me  that  a  certain 
idea,  or  emotion,  or  habit  of  mind,  or  even  any 
rite  or  incantation,  has  deprived  death  of  its  ter- 
rors for  him,  I  can  only  congratulate  him,  even  if  I 
have  to  confess  that  my  own  experience  gives  me 
no  clue  to  his  meaning.  It  is  not  even  very  profit- 
able to  enquire  whether  a  man  can  be  confident 
of  his  own  attitude  towards  death  unless  he  has 
either  come  very  close  to  its  brink  himself,  or 
known  what  it  means  to  witness  the  extinction  of 
a  life  on  which  his  whole  joy  in  the  present  and 
hope  for  the  future  depended.  All  one  can  do  is 
to  try  to  ascertain  as  nearly  as  possible  what  the 
contemner  of  death  really  means,  and  to  consider 
whether  his  individual  experience  or  feeling  is,  or 
is  likely  to  become,  typical. 

One  thing  we  must  plainly  realize,  and  that  is 
that,  for  the  purposes  of  his  present  argument, 
Mr.  Wells  conceives  death  to  be  a  real  extinction 
of  the  individual  consciousness.  He  does  not 
formally  commit  himself  to  a  denial  of  personal 
immortality,  but  it  is  a  contingency  which  he  de- 
clines to  take  into  account.  Oddly  enough,  in 


PERSONIFICATION  91 

trying  to  acclimatize  our  minds  to  the  idea  of  such 
an  absolutely  incorporeal  and  immaterial,  yet 
really  existent,  being  as  his  Invisible  King,  he 
comes  near  to  clearing  away  the  one  great  obstacle 
to  belief  in  survival  after  death.  "From  the 
earliest  ages,"  he  says,  "man's  mind  has  found 
little  or  no  difficulty  in  the  idea  of  something  essen- 
tial to  the  personality,  a  soul  or  a  spirit  or  both, 
existing  apart  from  the  body  and  continuing  after 
the  destruction  of  the  body,  and  being  still  a  person 
and  an  individual"  (p.  59).  He  does  not  actually 
say  that  there  is  no  difficulty  about  this  conception: 
he  only  says  that,  as  a  matter  of  history,  the  great 
mass  of  men  have  found  it  easy  and  natural  to  be- 
lieve in  ghosts.  But  it  is  hard  to  see  any  force  in 
his  argument  at  this  point  unless  he  means  to 
imply  that  he  himself  finds  "little  or  no  difficulty" 
in  conceiving  the  continued  existence  of  a 
spiritual  consciousness  and  individuality  after  the 
dissolution  of  the  body  to  which  it  has  been  at- 
tached; and  if  he  does  mean  this,  it  is  hard  to 
see  why  he  does  not  take  his  stand  beside  Sir 
Oliver  Lodge  on  the  spiritist  platform.  To  many 
of  us,  the  extreme  difficulty  of  such  a  conception 
is  the  one  great  barrier  to  the  acceptance  of  the 
spiritist  theory,  for  which  remarkable  evidence  can 


92 GOD  AND  MR.  WELLS 

certainly  be  adduced.  This,  however,  is  a  digres- 
sion. So  far  as  God  the  Invisible  King  is  con- 
cerned, Mr.  Wells  must  be  taken  as  ignoring,  if 
not  rejecting,  the  idea  of  personal  immortality. 

The  victory  over  death,  then,  which  the  Invisible 
King  is  said  to  achieve,  does  not  consist  in  its  aboli- 
tion. It  may  probably  be  best  defined  as  the  per- 
fect reconcilement  of  the  believer  to  the  extinction 
of  his  individual  consciousness.  And  what  are 
the  grounds  of  that  reconcilement?  Let  us  search 
the  scriptures.  Where  the  steps  are  described  by 
which  the  catechumen  approaches  the  full  realiza- 
tion of  God,  it  is  said  that  at  that  stage  he 
feels  that  "if  there  were  such  a  being  he  would 
supply  the  needed  consolation  and  direction,  his 
continuing  purpose  would  knit  together  the  scat- 
tered effort  of  life,  his  immortality  would  take  the 
sting  from  death"  (p.  21-22).  A  little  further  on, 
the  idea  is  elaborated  in  a  high  strain  of  mysticism. 
God,  who  "captains  us  but  does  not  coddle  us"  (p. 
42),  will  by  no  means  undertake  to  hold  the  be- 
liever scatheless  among  the  pitfalls  and  perils  that 
beset  our  earthly  pilgrimage.  "But  God  will  be 
with  you  nevertheless.  In  the  reeling  aeroplane,  or 
the  dark  ice-cave,  God  will  be  your  courage. 
Though  you  suffer  or  are  killed,  it  is  not  an  end. 


PERSONIFICATION  93 

He  will  be  with  you  as  you  face  death;  he  will  die 
with  you  as  he  has  died  already  countless  myriads 
of  brave  deaths.  He  will  come  so  close  to  you  that 
at  the  last  you  will  not  know  whether  it  is  you  or 
he  who  dies,  and  the  present  death  will  be  swal- 
lowed up  in  his  victory"  (p.  39).  The  passage 
has  already  been  quoted  in  which  it  is  written  that, 
at  the  end  of  the  fight  for  God's  Kingdom,  "we 
are  altogether  taken  up  into  his  being"  (p.  68). 
In  a  discussion  of  "the  religion  of  atheists"  we  are 
told  that  unregenerate  man  is  "acutely  aware  of 
himself  as  an  individual  and  unawakened  to  him- 
self as  a  species,"  wherefore  he  "finds  death  frus- 
tration." His  mistake  is  in  not  seeing  that  his 
own  frustration  "may  be  the  success  and  triumph  of 
his  kind"  (p.  72) .  At  the  point  where  we  are  told 
that  "the  first  purpose  of  God  is  the  attainment  of 
clear  knowledge,"  we  are  further  informed  that 
"he  will  apprehend  more  fully  as  time  goes  on" 
the  purpose  to  which  this  knowledge  is  to  be  ap- 
plied. But  already  it  is  possible  to  define  "the 
broad  outlines"  of  his  purpose.  "It  is  the  con- 
quest of  death;  first  the  overcoming  of  death  in  the 
individual  by  the  incorporation  of  the  motives  of 
his  life  into  an  undying  purpose"  (p.  99),  and 
then,  as  we  saw  before,  the  defeat  of  the  threat- 


94 GOD  AND  MR.  WELLS 

ened  extinction  of  life  through  the  cooling  of  the 
planet.  These,  I  think,  are  the  chief  texts  bearing 
directly  on  this  particular  matter;  but  there  is  one 
other  remark  which  must  not  be  overlooked.  "A 
convicted  criminal,  frankly  penitent,"  we  are  told, 
".  .  .  may  still  die  well  and  bravely  on  the  gal- 
lows, to  the  glory  of  God.  He  may  step  straight 
from  that  death  into  the  immortal  being  of  God." 

To  what,  now,  does  all  this  amount?  Is  there 
any  more  substantial  solace  in  it  than  in  the  "Oh, 
may  I  join  the  Choir  Invisible"  aspiration  of  mid- 
nineteenth-century  positivism?  Far  be  it  from 
me  to  speak  contemptuously  of  that  aspiration. 
It  gives  a  new  orientation  and  consistency  to 
thought  and  effort  during  life;  and  to  the  man 
who  feels  that  his  little  note  will  melt  into  the 
world-harmony  that  is  to  be,  that  thought  may 
impart  a  certain  serenity  under  the  shadow  of  the 
end.  It  is  certainly  better  to  feel  at  night,  "I 
have  done  a  fair  day's  work,"  than  to  lie  down 
with  the  confession,  "My  day  has  been  wasted, 
and  worse."  No  one  wants,  I  suppose,  to  say 
with  Peer  Gynt: — 

Thou  beautiful  earth,  be  not  angry  with  me, 

That  I  trampled  thy  grasses  to  no  avail; 

Thou  beautiful  sun,  thou  hast  squandered  away 


PERSONIFICATION  95 

Thy  glory  of  light  in  an  empty  hut. 

Beautiful  sun  and  beautiful  earth, 

You  were  foolish  to  bear  and  give  light  to  my  mother. 

But  there  is  also  another  side  to  the  question. 
The  more  surely  you  believe  that  "through  the 
ages  one  increasing  purpose  runs" — the  more 
intimately  you  have  merged  your  individual  will 
in  what  Mr.  Wells  would  call  the  will  of  the  In- 
visible King — the  less  do  you  relish  the  thought 
that  you  can  never  see  that  will  worked  out.  The 
intenser  your  interest  in  the  play,  the  greater  your 
disinclination  to  leave  the  theatre  just  as  the  plot 
is  thickening.  Nor  does  it  afford  much  consolation 
to  know  that  the  Producer  is  just  (as  it  were) 
getting  into  his  stride,  and  that,  if  the  house 
should  become  too  cold  for  comfort,  arrangements 
will  be  made  for  the  transference  of  the  production 
to  another  theatre,  with  a  better  heating- 
apparatus. 

Is  there  any  real  escape  from  the  fact  that  for 
each  of  us  the  one  thing  that  actually  exists  is  our 
individual  consciousness?  It  is  our  universe;  and 
if  its  trembling  flame  is  blown  out,  that  particular 
universe  is  no  more.  If  its  limits  of  "individua- 
tion"  are  irrecoverably  lost,  what  avails  it  to  tell 
us  that  the  flame  is  absorbed  into  the  light  of  the 


96 GOD  AND  MR.  WELLS 

world  or  the  dayspring  on  high?  Is  it  possible 
to  imagine  that  the  rain-drop  which  falls  in  the 
Atlantic  thrills  with  a  great  rapture  as  its  mole- 
cules disperse  in  the  moment  of  coalescence,  be- 
cause it  is  now  part  of  an  infinite  and  immortal 
entity?  Yes,  it  is  possible  to  imagine  it  rejoicing 
that  its  "chagrins  of  egotism,"  as  an  individual 
drop,  are  now  over;  in  fact,  this  is  precisely  the 
sort  of  thing  that  some  poets  love  to  imagine;  but 
has  it  any  real  relevance  to  our  sublunary  lot? 
Can  it  minister  any  substantial  comfort  or  forti- 
fication to  the  normal  man  in  the  moment  of  peril 
or  agony?  I  ask;  I  do  not  answer.  Can  Mr. 
Wells  put  in  the  witness-box  any  flight-lieutenant 
who  will  swear  that  in  his  reeling  aeroplane,  as 
death  seemed  on  the  point  of  engulfing  him,  he  felt 
uncertain  whether  it  was  God  or  he  that  was  about 
to  die,  and  gloriously  certain  that  in  any  case  he 
was  about  to  "step  straight  into  the  immortal 
being  of  God"?  And  even  if,  in  the  excitement  of 
violent  action,  such  hallucinations  do  mean  some- 
thing to  a  peculiar  type  of  mind,  has  any  one  dying 
of  pneumonia  or  Bright's  disease  been  known  to 
declare  that,  though  his  mortal  spark  was  on  the 
point  of  extinction,  he  felt  that  "by  the  incor- 
poration of  the  motives  of  his  life  into  an  undying 


PERSONIFICATION  97 

purpose"  he  had  triumphed  over  death  and  the 
grave?  The  simple  soul  who  says  "We  shall  meet 
in  Heaven"  no  douht  enjoys  such  a  triumph — and 
even  if  he  fails  to  keep  the  appointment,  no  one 
is  any  the  worse.  But  where  are  the  men  and 
women  who  feel  the  immortality  of  God,  however 
we  define  or  construct  him,  a  rich  compensation 
for  their  own  mortality? 

It  may  be  said  that  I  am  applying  shockingly 
terrestrial  tests  to  Mr.  Wells's  soaring  transcen- 
dentalisms. I  am  simply  asking:  "Will  they 
work?"  A  world-religion  cannot  be  what  I  have 
called  a  luxury  for  the  intellectually  wealthy.  It 
must  be  within  the  reach  of  plain  men  and  women; 
and  plain  men  and  women  cannot,  as  the  French 
say,  "pay  themselves  with  words."  Take  them 
all  round,  they  do  not  make  too  much  of  death. 
With  or  without  the  aid  of  religion,  they  generally 
meet  it  with  tolerable  fortitude.  But  it  will  be 
hard  to  persuade  them  that  annihilation  is  a  thing 
to  be  faced  with  rapture,  because  a  synthetic  God 
is  indestructible;  or  that  death  is  not  death  because 
other  people  will  be  alive  a  hundred  or  a  thousand 
years  hence.  Even  if  you  cannot  offer  them 
another  life,  you  may  tell  them  of  the  grave  as  a 
place  where  the  wicked  cease  from  troubling  and 


98 GOD  AND  MR.  WELLS 

the  weary  are  at  rest,  and  they  will  understand. 
But  will  they  understand  if  you  tell  them  that  we 
triumph  over  the  grave  because  God  dies  with  us 
and  yet  never  dies?  I  fear  it  will  need  something 
clearer  and  more  credible  than  this  to  make  the 
undertaker  a  popular  functionary. 

The  doctrines  of  "the  modern  religion"  may 
give  us  a  new  motive  for  living;  but  how  can  they 
at  the  same  time  diminish  our  distaste  for  dying? 
That  might  be  their  effect,  no  doubt,  in  cases 
where  we  felt  that  our  death  was  promoting  some 
great  and  sacred  cause  more  than  our  life  could 
have  done;  but  such  cases  must  always  be  ex- 
tremely rare.  Even  the  soldier  on  the  battlefield 
will  help  his  country  more  by  living  than  by  dying, 
if  he  can  do  so  without  failing  in  his  duty.  His 
death  is  not  a  triumph,  but  only  a  lesser  evil  than 
cowardice  and  disgrace.  And  what  shall  we  say, 
for  example,  of  the  case  of  a  young  biologist  who 
dies  of  blood-poisoning  on  the  eve  of  a  great  and 
beneficent  discovery?  Is  not  this  a  case  in  which 
the  modern  God  might  with  advantage  have 
swerved  from  his  principles  and  (for  once)  played 
the  part  of  Providence?  It  is  better,  no  doubt, 
to  die  in  a  good  cause  than  to  throw  away  life 


PERSONIFICATION 99 

in  the  pursuit  of  folly  or  vice;  but  is  it  not  playing 
with  words  to  say  that  even  the  end  of  a  martyr 
to  science  like  Captain  Scott,  or  a  martyr  to 
humanity  like  Edith  Cavell,  is  a  triumph  over 
death  and  the  grave?  It  is  a  triumph  over 
cowardice,  baseness,  the  love  of  ease  and  safety, 
all  the  paltrier  aspects  of  our  nature;  but  a 
triumph  over  death  it  is  not.  If  it  be  true  (which 
I  do  not  believe)  that  German  soldiers  sign  a  dec- 
laration devoting  the  glycerine  in  their  dead 
bodies  to  their  country's  service,  one  may  imagine 
that  some  of  them  feel  a  species  of  satisfaction  in 
resolving  upon  this  final  proof  of  patriotism;  but 
it  will  be  a  gloomy  satisfaction  at  best;  there  will 
be  a  lack  of  exhilaration  about  it;  if  the  Herr 
Hauptmann  who  witnesses  their  signatures  con- 
gratulates them  on  having  triumphed  over  death, 
they  will  be  apt  to  think  it  a  rather  empty  form 
of  words.  If  they  had  had  the  advantage  of  read- 
ing Jane  Austen,  they  would  probably  say  with 
Mr.  Bennet,  "Let  us  take  a  more  cheerful  view 
of  the  subject,  and  suppose  that  I  survive." 

I  fear  that  not  even  the  companionship  offered 
by  the  modern  God  in  the  act  of  dissolution  will 
make  death  a  cheerful  experience,  or  induce 


100  GOD  AND  MR.  WELLS 

ordinary,  unaffected  mortals  to  glory  in  their  mor- 
tality. It  is  too  much  the  habit  of  Gods  to  pretend 
to  die  when  they  don't  really  die  at  all — when,  in 
fact,  the  whole  idea  is  a  mere  intellectual  hocus- 
pocus. 


VII 

BACK  TO  THE  VEILED  BEING 

WHY  has  Mr.  Wells  partly  goaded  and 
partly  hypnotized  himself  into  the  be- 
lief that  he  is  the  predestined  prolocu- 
tor of  a  new  hocus-pocus?  Rightly  or  wrongly, 
I  diagnose  his  case  thus:  What  he  really  cares 
for  is  the  future  of  humanity,  or,  in  more  concrete 
language,  social  betterment.  He  suffers  more  than 
most  of  us  from  the  spectacle  of  the  world  of  to- 
day, because  he  has  the  constructive  imagination 
which  can  place  alongside  of  that  chaos  of  cupidi- 
ties and  stupidities  a  vision  of  a  rational  world- 
order  which  seems  easily  attainable  if  only  some 
malignant  spell  could  be  lifted  from  the  spirit  of 
man.  But  he  finds  himself  impotent  in  face  of 
the  crass  inertia  of  things-as-they-are.  Except  the 
gift  of  oratory,  he  has  all  possible  advantages  for 
the  part  of  a  social  regenerator.  He  has  the  pen 
of  a  ready  and  sometimes  very  impressive  writer; 

he  has  a  fair  training  in  science;  he  has  a  fertile 

101 


102  GOD  AND  MR.  WELLS 

and  inventive  brain;  his  works  of  fiction  have  won 
for  him  a  great  public,  both  in  Europe  and  Amer- 
ica; yet  he  feels  that  his  social  philosophy,  his 
ardent  and  enlightened  meliorism,  makes  no  more 
impression  than  the  buzzing  of  a  gnat  in  the  ear 
of  a  drowsy  mastodon.  At  the  same  time  he  has 
persuaded  himself,  whether  on  internal  or  on  ex- 
ternal evidence — partly,  I  daresay,  on  both — that 
men  cannot  thrive,  either  as  individuals  or  as 
world-citizens,  without  some  relation  of  reverence 
and  affection  to  something  outside  and  above  them- 
selves. He  foresees  that  Christianity  will  come 
bankrupt  out  of  the  War,  and  yet  that  the  huge, 
shattering  experience  will  throw  the  minds  of  men 
open  to  spiritual  influences.  At  the  same  time  (of 
this  one  could  point  to  several  incidental  evidences) 
he  has  come  a  good  deal  in  contact  with  Indian 
religiosity,  and  learnt  to  know  a  type  of  mind  to 
which  God,  in  one  form  or  another,  is  indeed  an 
essential  of  life,  while  the  particular  form  is  a 
matter  of  comparative  indifference.  Then  the  idea 
strikes  him:  "Have  we  not  here  a  great  opportunity 
for  placing  the  motive-power  of  spiritual  fervor 
behind,  or  within,  the  sluggish  framework  of  social 
idealism?  Here  it  lies,  well  thought-out,  carefully 
constructed,  but  inert,  like  an  aeroplane  without  an 


BACK  TO  THE  VEILED  BEING      103 

engine.  By  giving  the  glow  of  supernaturalism,  of 
the  worship  of  a  personal  God,  to  the  good  old 
Religion  of  Humanity,  may  we  not  impart  to  our 
schemes  for  a  well-ordered  world  precisely  the  up- 
lift they  at  present  lack?  It  was  all  very  well  for 
chilly  New  England  transcendentalism  to  'hitch  its 
waggon  to  a  star,'  but  the  result  is  that  Boston  is 
governed  by  a  Roman  Catholic  Archbishop.  It  is 
really  much  easier  and  more  effective  to  hitch  our 
waggon  to  God,  who,  being  a  synthesis  of  our 
own  higher  selves,  will  naturally  pull  it  in  whatever 
direction  we  want.  Thus  the  mass  of  mankind 
will  escape  from  that  spiritual  loneliness  which  is 
so  discomfortable  to  them,  and  will  find,  in  one 
and  the  same  personification,  a  deity  to  listen  to 
their  prayers,  and  a  'boss,'  in  the  Tammany  sense 
of  the  term,  to  herd  them  to  the  polling-booths. 
What  we  want  is  collectivism  touched  with  emo- 
tion. By  proclaiming  it  to  be  the  will  of  God,  and 
identifying  sound  politics  with  ecstatic  piety,  we 
may  shorten  by  several  centuries  the  path  to  a 
new  world-order." 

This  is  a  translation  into  plain  English  of  the 
thoughts  which  would  seem  to  have  possessed  Mr. 
Wells's  mind  during  the  past  year  or  so.  I  do  not 
for  a  moment  mean  that  he  put  them  to  himself 


104  GOD  AND  MR.  WELLS 

in  plain  English.  That  would  be  to  accuse  him  of 
insincerity — a  thought  which  I  most  sincerely  dis- 
claim. I  have  not  the  least  doubt  that  the  In- 
visible King  does  actually  supply  a  "felt  want" 
in  his  spiritual  outfit,  and  that  he  is  perfectly  con- 
vinced that  most  other  people  are  similarly  con- 
stituted and  will  welcome  this  new  object  of  loyalty 
and  devotion.  Time  will  show  whether  his  psychol- 
ogy is  correct.  If  it  is,  then  he  has  indeed  made 
an  important  discovery.  To  use  a  very  homely 
illustration:  a  carrot  dangled  from  the  end  of  a 
stick  before  a  donkey's  nose  makes  no  mechanical 
difference  in  the  problem  of  traction  presented  by 
the  costermonger's  barrow.  If  anything,  it  adds 
to  the  weight  to  be  drawn.  But  if  the  sight  of  it 
cheers,  heartens,  and  inspires  the  donkey,  helping 
him  to  overcome  those  fits  of  lethargy  so  charac- 
teristic of  his  race,  then  the  carrot  may  quite 
appreciably  accelerate  the  general  rate  of  prog- 
ress. It  all  depends  on  the  psychology  of  the 
donkey. 

Moses  doubtless  did  very  wisely  in  going  up 
into  Mount  Sinai  and  abiding  there  forty  days  and 
forty  nights.  Whatever  he  may  have  seen  and 
heard,  the  semblance  of  communion  with  a  Higher 
Power  unquestionably  lent  a  prestige  to  his  scheme 


BACK  TO  THE  VEILED  BEING      105 

of  social  reform  which  it  could  never  have  attained 
had  he  offered  it  on  its  inherent  merits,  as  the  pro- 
ject of  a  mere  human  legislator,  or  (still  worse) 
of  a  man  of  letters.  Moses,  in  fact,  knew  his 
Children  of  Israel.  Does  Mr.  Wells  know  his 
modern  Englishmen  or  Anglo-Americans? 

That  is  the  question. 

Mr.  Bernard  Shaw  has  made  a  similar  and  very 
ingenious  attempt,  not  exactly  to  found  a  new 
religion,  but  to  place  his  ideas  in  a  religious  atmos- 
phere. In  the  preface  to  Androcles  and  the  Lion 
(a  disquisition  just  about  as  long  as  God  the  In- 
visible King)  he  propounds  the  question,  "Why 
not  give  Christianity  a  trial?"  and  opens  the  dis- 
cussion thus:  "The  question  seems  a  hopeless  one 
after  2,000  years  of  resolute  adherence  to  the  old 
cry  of  'Not  this  man,  but  Barabbas.'  Yet  it  is 
beginning  to  look  as  if  Barabbas  was  a  failure,  in 
spite  of  his  strong  right  hand,  his  victories,  his 
empires,  his  millions  of  money,  and  his  moralities 
and  churches  and  political  constitutions.  'This 
man'  has  not  been  a  failure  yet;  for  nobody  has 
ever  been  sane  enough  to  try  his  way."  Then  he 
goes  on  to  shew,  by  a  course  of  very  plausible 
reasoning,  that  the  teaching  of  Jesus  was,  in  all 
essentials,  an  exact  anticipation  of  the  economic 


106  GOD  AND  MR.  WELLS 

and  social  philosophy  of  G.  B.  S.;  so  that,  in 
giving  political  expression  to  that  philosophy,  we 
should  be,  for  the  first  time,  establishing  the  King- 
dom of  Christ  upon  earth.  It  is  true  that  there 
are  passages  in  the  Gospels  which  no  more  accord 
with  Mr.  Shaw's  sociology  than  do  omnipotence 
and  omniscience  with  the  theology  of  Mr.  Wells. 
But  these  passages  do  not  embarrass  Mr.  Shaw. 
He  simply  points  out  that,  at  Matthew  xvi,  16, 
where  Peter  hailed  him  as  "the  Christ,  the  Son  of 
the  living  God,"  Jesus  went  mad.  Up  to  that 
fatal  moment  "his  history  is  that  of  a  man  sane 
and  interesting  apart  from  his  special  gifts  as 
orator,  healer  and  prophet";  but  from  that  point 
onward  he  set  to  work  to  live  up  to  "his  destiny 
as  a  god,"  part  of  which  was  to  be  killed  and  to 
rise  again.  Many  other  prophets  have  gone  mad — 
for  instance,  Ruskin  and  Nietzsche.  Therefore  we 
can  have  no  difficulty  in  simply  eliminating  as  a 
morbid  aberration  whatever  is  un-Shavian  in  the 
message  of  Jesus,  and  accepting  the  rest  as  the 
sincere  milk  of  the  word.  Mr.  Shaw's  attempt  to 
place  his  philosophy  under  divine  patronage  is  not 
so  serious  as  Mr.  Wells's ;  for  Mr.  Shaw  can  never 
take  himself  quite  seriously  for  five  pages  to- 
gether. But  the  motive,  in  each  case,  in  mani- 


BACK  TO  THE  VEILED  BEING      107 

festly  the  same — to  obtain  for  a  system  of  ideas 
the  prestige,  the  power  of  insinuation,  penetration, 
and  stimulation,  that  attaches  to  the  very  name  of 
religion. 

The  notion  is  a  very  tempting  one.  What  every 
prophet  wants,  in  the  babel  of  latter-day  thought, 
is  a  magic  sounding-board  which  shall  make  his 
voice  carry  to  the  ends  of  the  earth  and  penetrate 
to  the  dullest  understanding.  The  more  he  be- 
lieves in  his  own  reason,  the  more  he  yearns  for 
some  method  of  out-shouting  the  unreason  of  his 
neighbours.  German  philosophy  thought  it  had 
discovered  the  ideal  reverberator  in  the  artillery 
of  Herr  Krupp  von  Bohlen;  but  the  world  is 
curiously  indisposed  to  conversion  by  cannon,  and 
has  retorted  in  a  still  louder  roar  of  high-explosive 
arguments.  God,  as  a  politico-philosophical  ally, 
is  certainly  cheaper  than  Herr  Krupp;  and, 
divested  of  his  mediaeval  sword  and  tinder-box,  he 
is  decidedly  humaner.  But  is  the  glamour  of  his 
name  quite  what  it  once  was?  Or  can  it  be  re- 
stored to  its  pristine  potency? 

On  a  question,  such  as  this,  on  which  the  evi- 
dence is  too  vague,  too  voluminous  and  too  com- 
plex to  be  interpreted  with  any  certainty,  our 
wishes  are  apt  to  take  control  of  our  thoughts. 


108  GOD  AND  MR.  WELLS 

Making  all  allowance  for  this  source  of  error,  I 
nevertheless  venture  to  suggest  to  Mr.  Wells  that 
we  may  perhaps  be  passing  out  of,  not  into,  an 
age  of  religiosity.  May  it  not  be  that  the  time  has 
come  to  give  the  name  of  God  a  rest?  Is  it  not 
possible,  and  even  probable,  that,  while  the  vast 
apocalypse  of  the  observatory  and  the  laboratory 
is  proceeding  with  unexampled  speed,  thinking 
people  may  prefer  to  await  its  developments, 
rather  than  pin  their  faith  to  an  interim,  synthetic 
God,  whom  his  own  still,  small  voice  must,  in 
moments  of  candor,  confess  to  be  merely  make- 
believe?  Is  it  the  fact  that  men,  or  even  women, 
of  our  race  are,  as  a  rule,  absolutely  dependent  for 
courage,  energy,  self-control  and  self-devotion, 
upon  some  "great  brother"  outside  themselves, 
"a  strongly-marked  personality,  loving,  inspiring 
and  lovable,"  whom  they  conceive  to  be  always 
within  call?  In  making  this  assumption,  is  not 
Mr.  Wells  ignoring  the  great  mass  of  paganism 
in  the  world  around  him — not  all  of  it,  or  even 
most  of  it,  self-conscious  and  self-confessed,  but 
none  the  less  real  on  that  account?  He  makes  a 
curious  remark  as  to  the  personage  whom  he  calls 
"the  benevolent  atheist,"  which  is,  I  take  it,  his 


BACK  TO  THE  VEILED  BEING      109 

nickname  for  the  man  who  is  not  much  interested 
in  midway  Gods  between  himself  and  the  Veiled 
Being.  This  hapless  fellow-creature,  says  Mr. 
Wells,  "has  not  really  given  himself  or  got  away 
from  himself.  He  has  no  one  to  whom  he  can 
give  himself.  He  is  still  a  masterless  man"  (p. 
83) .  As  Mr.  Wells  has  evidently  read  a  good  deal 
about  Japan,  he  no  doubt  takes  this  expression 
from  Japanese  feudalism,  which  made  a  distinct 
class  of  the  "ronin"  or  masterless  man,  who  had, 
by  death  or  otherwise,  lost  his  feudal  superior. 
But  is  it  really,  to  our  Western  sense,  a  misfortune 
to  be  a  masterless  man?  Does  the  healthy  human 
spirit  suffer  from  having  no  one  to  bow  down  to, 
no  one  to  relieve  it  of  the  burden  of  choice,  re- 
sponsibility, self-control?  If  our  feudal  allegiance 
has  terminated  through  the  death  of  the  Gods  who 
asserted  a  hereditary  claim  upon  it,  must  we  make 
haste  to  build  ourselves  an  idol,  or  synthetize  a 
mosaic  ikon,  to  serve  as  the  recipient  of  our 
obeisances,  genuflexions,  osculations?  I  cannot 
believe  that  this  is  a  general,  and  much  less  a  uni- 
versal, tendency.  If  any  one  is  irked  by  the  con- 
dition of  a  "masterless  man,"  the  Roman  Catholic 
Church  holds  wide  its  doors  for  him.  It  seems  very 


110  GOD  AND  MR.  WELLS 

doubtful  whether  any  less  ancient,  dogmatic, 
hieratic,  spectacular  form  of  make-believe  will 
serve  his  turn. 

It  has  sometimes  seemed  to  me  that  the  one 
great  advantage  of  Western  Christianity  lies  in 
the  fact  that  nobody  very  seriously  believes  in  it. 
"Nobody"  is  not  a  mathematically  accurate  ex- 
pression, but  it  is  quite  in  the  line  of  the  truth. 
You  have  to  go  to  Asia  to  find  out  what  religion 
means.  If  you  cannot  get  so  far,  Russia  will  serve 
as  a  half-way  house;  but  to  study  religion  on  its 
native  heath,  so  to  speak,  you  must  go  to  India. 
Of  course  there  may  be  some  illusion  in  the  matter, 
due  to  one's  ignorance  of  the  languages  and  in- 
ability to  estimate  the  exact  spiritual  significance 
of  outward  manifestations;  but  I  cannot  believe 
that,  anywhere  between  Suez  and  Singapore,  there 
exists  that  healthy  godlessness,  that  lack  of  any 
real  effective  dependence  on  any  outward  Power 
"dal  tetto  in  su,"  which  is  so  common  in  and 
around  all  Christian  churches.  In  China  and 
Japan  it  is  another  matter.  There,  I  fancy,  re- 
ligious "ronins"  are  common  enough.  But  in  the 
lands  of  the  Crescent  and  the  land  of  "OM," 
anything  like  freedom  of  the  human  spirit  is  prob- 
ably very  rare  and  very  difficult.  The  difference 


BACK  TO  THE  VEILED  BEING      111 

does  not  arise  from  any  lesser  stringency  in  the 
claims  of  Christianity  to  spiritual  dominion,  but 
rather,  I  imagine,  from  a  deep-seated  divergence 
in  racial  heredity.  We  Western  Aryans  have  be- 
hind us  the  serene  and  splendid  rationalisms  of 
Greece  and  Rome.  We  are  accustomed  from  child- 
hood to  the  knowledge  that  our  civilization  was 
founded  by  two  mighty  aristocracies  of  intellect, 
to  whom  the  religions  of  their  day  were,  as  they 
are  to  us,  nothing  but  more  or  less  graceful  fairy- 
tales.1 We  know  that  many  of  the  greatest  men 
the  world  ever  saw,  while  phrasing  their  relation 
to  the  "deus  absconditus"  in  various  ways,  were 
utterly  free  from  that  penitential,  supplicatory 
abjectness  which  is  the  mark  of  Asian  salvation- 
ism.  And  though  of  course  the  conscious  filiation 
to  Greece  and  Rome  is  rare,  the  habit  of  mind 
which  holds  up  its  head  in  the  world  and  feels  no 
childish  craving  to  cling  to  the  skirts  of  a  God,  is 
not  rare  at  all.  Therefore  I  conceive  that  people 
who  are  shaken  out  of  their  conventional,  un- 
realized Christianity  by  the  earthquake  of  the  war 
will  not,  as  a  rule,  be  in  any  hurry  to  rush  into 

i  Namque  deos  'didici  securura  agere  aevum, 
nee,    siquid    miri    faciat    natura,    deos    id 
tristes  ex  alto  caeli  demittere  tecto. 

HORACE,  Satires   I.,  5. 


112  GOD  AND  MR.  WELLS 

the  arms  of  the  "great  brother"  constructed  for 
them  by  Mr.  Wells.  It  is  easier  to  picture  them 
flocking  to  the  banner  of  the  Fabian  Jesus — the 
Christ  uncrucified,  and  restored  to  sanity,  of  Mr. 
Bernard  Shaw. 

Does  it  really  seem  to  Mr.  Wells  an  arid  and 
damnable  "atheism"  that  finds  in  the  very  mys- 
tery of  existence  a  subject  of  contemplation  so 
inexhaustibly  marvellous  as  to  give  life  the  fascina- 
tion of  a  detective  story?  When  Mr.  Wells  tells 
us  that  "the  first  purpose  of  God  is  the  attain- 
ment of  clear  knowledge,  of  knowledge  as  a  means 
to  more  knowledge,  and  of  knowledge  as  a  means 
to  power,"  he  states  what  is,  to  many  of  us,  the 
first  and  last  article  of  religion — only  that  we  pre- 
fer to  steer  clear  of  hocus-pocus  and  substitute 
"Man"  for  "God."  If  we  are  almost,  or  even 
quite,  reconciled  to  the  cruelties  and  humiliations 
of  life  by  the  thought  of  its  visual  glories,  its  in- 
tellectual triumphs,  and  the  mysteries  with  which 
it  is  surrounded,  is  that  frame  of  mind  wholly  un- 
worthy to  be  called  religious?  If  it  is,  I,  for  one, 
shall  not  complain;  for  religion,  like  God,  is  a 
word  that  has  been — 


BACK  TO  THE  VEILED  BEING      113 

Defamed   by  every  charlatan 
And  soil'd  with  all  ignoble  use. 

But  it  will  be  difficult  to  persuade  me  of  the  loftier 
spirituality,  or  even  the  more  abiding  solace,  in- 
volved in  ecstatic  devotion  to  a  figure  of  speech. 

There  are  two  elements  of  consolation  in  life: 
the  things  of  which  we  are  sure,  and  the  things 
of  which  we  are  unsure.  We  are  sure  that  man 
has  somehow  been  launched  upon  the  most 
romantic  adventure  that  mind  can  conceive.  He 
has  set  forth  to  conquer  and  subdue  the  world, 
including  the  stupidities  and  basenesses  of  his  own 
nature.  At  first  his  progress  was  incalculably 
slow;  then  he  came  on  with  a  rush  in  the  great 
sub-tropical  river  basins;  and  presently,  where  the 
brine  of  the  .ZEgean  got  into  his  blood,  he  achieved 
such  miracles  of  thought  and  art  that  his  subse- 
quent history,  for  well-nigh  two  thousand  years, 
bore  the  appearance  of  retrogression.  I  have 
already  asked  what  the  Invisible  King  was  about 
when  he  suffered  the  glory  that  was  Athens  to 
sink  in  the  fog-bank  that  was  Alexandria.  At  all 
events,  that  wonderful  false-start  came  to  nothing. 
Rome  succeeded  to  the  world-leadership;  and 
Rome,  though  energetic  and  capable,  was  never 


114  GOD  AND  MR.  WELLS 

brilliant.  With  her,  European  free  thought,  in- 
vestigation, science  flickered  out,  and  Asian  re- 
ligion took  its  place.  Truly  the  slip-back  from 
antiquity  to  the  dark  ages  offers  a  specious  argu- 
ment to  the  atheists — the  true  and  irredeemable 
atheists — who  deny  the  reality  of  progress. 
Specious,  but  quite  insubstantial;  for  we  can 
analyze  the  terrestrial  conditions  which  led  to  that 
catastrophe,  and  assure  ourselves  that  the  bug- 
bear of  their  recurrence  is  nothing  more  than  a 
bugbear.  The  printing-press  alone  is  an  inestim- 
able safeguard.  If  the  Greeks  had  hit  upon  the 
idea  of  movable  types — and  it  is  little  to  the  credit 
of  the  Invisible  King  that  they  did  not — the  on- 
rush of  barbarism  and  Byzantinism  would  not  have 
been  half  so  disastrous.  And  even  through  the 
Dark  Ages  the  bias  towards  betterment  is  still 
perceptible,  though  its  operation  was  terribly 
hampered.  Then,  at  last,  the  sixteenth  and  seven- 
teenth centuries  took  up  the  thread  of  progress 
where  antiquity  had  dropped  it.  Science  revived, 
and  bade  defiance  to  dogma.  The  garnering  of 
knowledge  began  afresh;  and  true  knowledge  has 
this  to  distinguish  it  from  pseudo-sciences  like 
astrology,  theology,  and  philately,  that  it  is  in- 
stinct with  procreative  vigour.  Knowledge  breeds 


BACK  TO  THE  VEILED  BEING      115 

knowledge  with  ever-increasing  rapidity;  and  the 
result  is  that  the  past  hundred  years  have  seen 
additions  to  man's  control  over  the  powers  of 
nature  which  outstrip  the  wildest  imaginings  of 
Eastern  romance.  When  Mr.  Gladstone  first  went 
to  Rome  in  1832,  his  "transportation"  was  no 
swifter  and  scarcely  more  comfortable  than  that 
of  Caesar  in  the  fifties  before  Christ.  Today  he 
could  fly  over  the  Matterhorn  and  Monte  Rosa, 
and  then  cover  the  distance  from  Milan  onwards 
at  the  rate  of  seventy  miles  an  hour  in  a  limousine 
as  luxurious  as  an  Empress's  boudoir.  We  are 
piling  up  the  knowledge  which  is  power  at  an 
enormous  rate — indeed  rather  too  rapidly,  since 
we  have  not  yet  the  sense  to  discriminate  between 
power  for  good  and  power  for  evil.  But  "burnt 
bairns  dread  the  fire,"  and  after  the  present  awful 
experience,  there  is  fair  ground  for  hope  that  meas- 
ures will  be  taken  to  provide  strait-waistcoats  for 
the  criminal  lunatics  whose  vanity  and  greed  impel 
them  to  let  loose  the  powers  of  destruction. 

Can  any  thinking  man  say  that  the  world  is  quite 
the  same  to  him  since  the  invention  of  wireless 
telegraphy?  True  it  is  only  one  among  the  multi- 
tude of  phenomena  behind  which  the  Veiled  Being 
dissembles  himself.  But  is  it  not  a  phenomenon 


116  GOD  AND  MR.  .WELLS 

of  a  new  and  perhaps  an  epoch-marking  order? 
It  may  not  make  the  veil  more  diaphanous,  but 
it  somehow  suggests  an  alteration — perhaps  a  pro- 
gressive alteration — in  its  texture. 

When  we  say  we  are  sure  of  the  fact  of  progress, 
the  atheist  comes  down  on  us  with  the  retort  that 
we  thereby  confess  ourselves  naive  and  credulous 
optimists.  As  well  say  that  when  we  express  our 
confidence  that  the  North  Western  Railway  will 
carry  us  to  Manchester,  we  thereby  imply  the 
belief  that  Manchester  is  the  Earthly  Paradise.  It 
is  quite  possible — any  one  who  is  so  minded  may 
say  it  is  quite  probable — that  progress  means  ad- 
vance towards  disillusion.  What  we  are  sure  of 
is  merely  this:  that  life  may  be,  and  ought  to  be, 
a  very  different  thing  from  what  it  now  is,  and 
that  it  is  in  our  own  power  to  make  it  so.  We 
have  not  the  least  doubt  that  the  generations  which 
come  after  us  will  say: — 

We  will  not  cease  from  mortal  strife, 
Nor  shall  the  sword  slip  from  our  hand, 

Till  we  have  built  Jerusalem 

In  England's  green  and  pleasant  land. 

But  whether,  when  they  have  built  it,  they  will 
think  Jerusalem  worth  the  building  is  quite  a 
different  matter.  It  may  be  that  Leopardi  was 


BACK  TO  THE  VEILED  BEING      117 

right  when  he  said,  "Men  are  miserable  by  neces- 
sity, but  resolute  in  believing  themselves  to  be 
miserable  by  accident."  That  is  a  proposition 
which  the  individual  can  accept  or  reject  so  far  as 
his  own  little  span  is  concerned,  but  on  which  the 
race,  as  such,  can  pass  no  valid  judgment.  Life 
has  never  had  a  fair  chance.  It  has  always  been 
so  beset  with  accidental  and  corrigible  evils  that 
no  man  can  say  what  life,  in  its  ultimate  essence, 
really  is.  All  we  know  is  that  many  of  its  miseries 
are  factitious,  inessential,  eminently  curable;  and 
till  these  are  eradicated,  how  are  we  to  determine 
whether  there  are  other  evils  too  deep-rooted  for 
our  surgery?  It  may  be,  for  example,  that  the 
elimination  of  Pain  would  only  leave  a  vacuum 
for  Tedium  to  rush  in;  but  how  are  we  to  decide 
this  a  priori?  Let  us  learn  what  are  the  true 
potentialities  of  life  before  we  undertake  to  declare 
whether  it  is  worth  living  or  not. 

Perhaps  I  may  be  allowed  to  quote  at  this  point 
some  words  of  my  own  which  express  the  idea  I 
am  trying  to  convey  as  clearly  as  I  am  capable  of 
putting  it.  They  are  part  of  the  last  paragraph 
of  an  address  entitled  Knowledge  and  Character: 
The  Straight  Road  in  Education: 1 

1  London:  George  Allen  and  Unwin,  1916. 


118  GOD  AND  MR.  WELLS 

The  great,  dominant,  all-controlling  fact  of  this  life  is  the 
innate  bias  of  the  human  spirit,  not  towards  evil,  as  the 
theologians  tell  us,  but  towards  good.  But  for  this  bias,  man 
would  never  have  been  man;  he  would  only  have  been  one  more 
species  of  wild  animal  ranging  a  savage,  uncultivated  globe,  the 
reeking  battle-ground  of  sheer  instinct  and  appetite.  But 
somehow  and  somewhere  there  germinated  in  his  mind  the  idea 
that  association,  co-operation,  would  serve  his  ends  better  than 
unbridled  egoism  in  the  struggle  for  existence.  Instead  of 
"each  man  for  himself"  his  motto  became  "each  man  for  his 
family,  or  his  tribe,  or  his  nation,  or — ultimately — for  human- 
kind." And,  at  a  very  early  stage,  what  made  for  association, 
co-operation,  brotherhood,  came  to  be  designated  "good,"  while 
that  which  sinned  against  these  upward  tendencies  was  stig- 
matized as  "evil."  From  that  moment  the  battle  was  won, 
and  the  transfiguration  of  human  life  became  only  a  matter 
of  time.  The  prejudice  in  favour  of  the  idea  of  good  is  the 
fundamental  fact  of  our  moral  nature.  It  has  an  irresistible,  a 
magical  prestige.  We  have  made,  and  are  still  making,  a 
myriad  mistakes — tragic  and  horrible  mistakes — in  striving  for 
good  things  which  are  evils  in  disguise.  A  few  of  us  (though 
relatively  not  very  many)  try  to  overcome  the  prejudice  alto- 
gether, and  say,  "Evil,  be  thou  my  good!"  But  even  these 
recreants  and  deserters  from  the  great  army  of  humanity  have 
to  express  themselves  in  terms  of  good,  and  to  take  their  stand 
on  a  sheer  contradiction.  Evil,  as  such,  has  simply  not  a 
fighting  chance.  The  prestige  of  good  is  stupendous.  We 
are  all  hypnotized  by  it;  and  the  reason  we  are  slow  in  realiz- 
ing the  ideal  is,  not  that  we  are  evil,  but  that  we  are  stupid. 

"Mit  der  Dummheit  kampfen  Cotter  selbst  ver- 
gebens" — no  one  had  a  better  right  to  say  that 
than  a  German  poet.  But  though  the  Invisible 
King  has  made  a  poor  fight  against  human 
stupidity,  it  is  not  really  unconquerable.  If  Gods 


BACK  TO  THE  VEILED  BEING      119 

cannot  conquer  it,  men  can.  Its  strongholds  are 
falling  one  by  one,  and,  though  a  long  fight  is 
before  us,  its  end  is  not  in  doubt. 

We  may  even  hope,  not  without  some  plausi- 
bility, that  moral  progress  may  be  all  the  more 
rapid  in  the  future  because  the  limit  of  what  may 
be  called  mechanical  progress  cannot  be  so  very  far 
off.  The  conquest  of  distance  is  the  great  material 
fact  that  makes  for  world-organization;  and 
distance  cannot,  after  all,  be  more  than  annhilated 
— it  cannot  be  reduced  to  a  minus  quantity.  Now 
that  we  can  whisper  round  the  globe  as  we  whisper 
round  the  dome  of  St.  Paul's,  we  cannot  get  much 
further  on  that  line  of  advance,  until  immaterial 
thought-transference  shall  enable  us  "to  flash 
through  one  another  in  a  moment  as  we  will."  We 
may  before  long  have  reduced  the  crossing  of  the 
Atlantic  from  five  days  to  one,  or  even  less;  but 
in  that  direction,  too,  there  is  a  limit  to  progress; 
no  invention  will  enable  us  to  arrive  before  we 
start.  The  conquest  of  physical  disease  seems  to 
be  well  within  view;  the  possibilities  of  intensive 
cultivation  and  selective  breeding  in  plants  and 
animals  are  likely  to  be  rapidly  developed.  When 
such  material  problems  cease  to  exercise  the  first 
fascination  upon  the  enquiring  mind,  the  mental 


120  GOD  AND  MR.  WELLS 

sciences,  psychology  and  sociology,  with  the  great 
neglected  art  of  education,  may  come  into  their 
kingdom.  Then  the  atheism  which  avers  that  the 
world  stands  still,  or  moves  only  in  a  circle,  will 
no  longer  be  possible.  Then  all  reasonable  men 
will  feel  themselves  soldiers  in  "a  mighty  army 
which  has  won  splendid  victories  (though  here  and 
there  chequered  with  defeats)  on  its  march  out  of 
the  dim  and  tragic  past,  and  is  clearly  destined  to 
far  greater  triumphs  in  the  future,  if  only  each 
man  does,  with  unflinching  loyalty,  the  duty 
assigned  to  him."  That  loyalty  will  then  be  the 
conscious  and  acknowledged  rule  of  life,  as  it  is 
now  in  an  instinctive  and  half-realized  fashion.  It 
will  help  us,  more  than  all  the  personifications  in 
the  world,  to  "turn  away  from  self."  It  will  not 
take  the  sting  from  death,  but  it  will  enable  us  to 
feel  that  we  have  earned  our  rest,  and  brought  no 
disgrace  upon  the  colors  of  our  regiment. 

Is  it  necessary  to  protest  once  more  that  this 
assurance  of  progress  towards  the  good  is  not  to 
be  confounded  with  optimism?  For  it  is  clear 
that  "good"  is  a  question-begging  word.  The 
only  possible  definition  of  "good"  is  "that  which 
makes  for  life" — for  life,  not  only  measured  by 
quantity,  but  by  quality  and  intensity — "that  ye 


BACK  TO  THE  VEILED  BEING      121 

may  have  life  more  abundantly."  Why  is  egoism 
evil?  Because  a  world  in  which  it  reigned  supreme 
would  very  soon  come  to  an  end,  or  at  any  rate 
could  not  support  anything  like  the  abundance  of 
life  which  is  rendered  possible  by  mutual  aid  and 
co-operation.  Why  are  order,  justice,  courage, 
humanity  good?  Because  they  enable  more  people 
to  lead  fuller  lives  than  would  be  possible  in  the 
absence  of  such  guiding  principles.  But  in  all  this 
we  assume  the  validity  of  the  standard — "life" 
— which  is  precisely  what  pessimism  denies.  And 
pessimism  may  quite  conceivably  be  in  the  right 
on't.  It  is  quite  conceivable  that,  having  made 
the  best  that  can  possibly  be  made  of  life,  a  world- 
weary  race  might  decide  that  the  best  was  not 
good  enough,  and  deliberately  turn  away  from  it. 
But  that  is  a  contingency,  a  speculation,  which 
no  sane  man  would  allow  to  affect  his  action  here 
and  now,  or  to  impair  his  loyalty  to  his  comrades 
in  the  great  terrestrial  adventure. 

And  is  not  this  question  of  the  ultimate  value 
of  life  precisely  one  of  the  uncertainties  which  lend 
— if  the  flippancy  may  be  excused — a  "sporting 
interest"  to  our  position?  I  have  said  that  we 
have  two  elements  of  consolation:  the  things  which 
are  sure  and  the  things  which  are  unsure:  in  other 


122  GOD  AND  MR.  WELLS 

words,  the  axioms  and  the  mysteries.  Reason  is 
all  very  well  so  far  as  it  goes,  and  we  do  right  to 
trust  to  it;  but  it  may  prove,  after  all,  that  the 
things  that  are  behind  and  beyond  and  above 
reason  are  the  things  that  really  matter.  Does 
this  seem  a  concession  to  obscurantism?  Not  at 
all — for  the  things  obscurantism  glories  in  are 
things  beneath  reason,  which  is  quite  another 
affair.  At  the  same  time,  we  are  too  apt  to  think 
that  reason  has  drawn  a  complete  outline-map  of 
its  "sphere  of  influence,"  in  which  there  are  many 
details  to  be  filled  in,  but  no  boundaries  to  be 
shifted,  no  regions  wholly  unexplored.  It  is,  for 
instance,  very  unreasonable  to  hold  that  we  can 
draw  a  hard  and  fast  line  between  the  materially 
possible  and  impossible.  There  is  certainly  a 
curious  ragged  edge  to  our  purely  scientific  knowl- 
edge, and  it  may  well  be  that  in  following  up  the 
frayed-out  threads  we  may  come  upon  things  very 
surprising  and  important.  For  example,  the  ques- 
tion whether  consciousness  can  exist  detached  from 
organized  matter,  or  attached  to  some  form  of 
matter  of  which  we  have  no  knowledge,  I  regard 
as  purely  a  question  of  evidence;  and  I  not  only 
admit  but  assert  that  the  evidence  pointing  in  that 
direction  is  worthy  of  careful  examination.  The 


BACK  TO  THE  VEILED  BEING      123 

interpretation  which  sees  in  it  a  proof  of  personal 
immortality  may  be  wrong,  but  that  does  not 
prove  that  the  right  interpretation  is  not  worth 
discovering.  The  spiritist  voyagers  may  not  have 
reached  the  Indies  of  their  hopes,  yet  may  have 
stumbled  upon  an  unsuspected  America.  Nor  does 
the  fact  that  they  are  eager  and  credulous  in- 
validate the  whole,  or  anything  like  the  whole,  of 
their  evidence. 

After  all,  is  it  a  greater  miracle  that  conscious- 
ness should  exist  detached  from  matter  than  that 
it  should  exist  attached  to  matter?  Yet  the  latter 
miracle  nobody  doubts,  except  in  the  nursery  games 
of  the  metaphysicians. 

To  define,  or  rather  to  adumbrate,  the  realm  of 
mystery,  which  is  yet  as  indisputably  real  as  the 
realm  of  reason  and  sense,  we  naturally  turn  to 
the  poets,  the  seers.  Here  is  a  glimpse  of  it 
through  the  eyes  of  Francis  Thompson,  that  crea- 
ture of  transcendent  vision  who  made  a  strange 
pretence  of  wearing  the  blinkers  of  the  Roman 
Catholic  Church.  Thus  he  writes  in  his  "Anthem 
of  Earth":- 

Ay,  Mother !    Mother ! 

What  is  this  Man,  thy  darling  kissed  and  cuffed, 
Thou  lustingly  engender'st, 
To  sweat,  and  make  his  brag,  and  rot, 


124  GOD  AND  MR.  WELLS 

^ — — __ — — ^ — — — ^— — ^— — — .^— ^— ^__ ___^_ 

Crowned  with  all  honour  and   all  shamef ulness  ? 

From  nightly  towers 

He  dogs  the  secret  footsteps  of  the  heavens, 

Sifts  in  his  hands  the  stars,  weighs  them  as  gold-dust, 

And  yet  is  he  successive  unto  nothing 

But  patrimony  of  a  little  mould, 

And  entail  of  four  planks.    Thou  hast  made  his  mouth 

Avid  of  all  dominion  and  all  mightiness, 

All  sorrow,  all  delight,  all  topless  grandeurs, 

All  beauty   and   all   starry  majesties, 

And  dim  transtellar  things; — even  that  it  may, 

Filled  in  the  ending  with  a  puff  of  dust, 

Confess — "It  is  enough."    The  world  left  empty 

What   that   poor  mouthful  crams.     His   heart  is   builded 

For  pride,  for  potency,  infinity, 

All  heights,  all  deeps,  and  all  immensities, 

Arras'd  with  purple  like  the  house  of  kings, — 

To  stall  the  grey  rat,  and  the  carrion-worm 

Statelily  lodge.    Mother  of  mysteries! 

Sayer  of  dark  sayings  in  a  thousand  tongues, 

Who  bringest  forth  no  saying  yet  so  dark 

As  we  ourselves,  thy  darkest! 

Surely  this  is  the  very  truth.  Man  is  a  hiero- 
glyph to  which  reason  supplies  no  key — nay, 
reason  itself  is  the  heart  of  the  enigma.  And  does 
not  this  lend  a  strange  fascination  to  the  adven- 
ture of  life? 

Another  singer,  in  a  very  much  simpler  strain, 
puts  something  of  the  same  idea: — 

Marooned  on  an  isle  of  mystery, 

From  a  stupor  of  sleep  we  woke, 
And  gazed  at  each  other  wistfully, 

A  wondering,  wildered  folk. 


BACK  TO  THE  VEILED  BEING      125 

There   were  flowery   valleys   and  mountains   blue, 

And  pastures,  and  herds  galore, 
And   fruits   that   were  luscious   to   bite  into, 

Though  bitter  at  the  core. 

So  we  plucked  up  heart,  and  we  dree'd  our  weird 

Through  flickering  gleam  and  gloom, 
And  still  for  rescue  we  hoped — or  feared — 

From  our  island  home  and  tomb. 

But  never  over  the  sailless  sea 

Came  messenger  bark  or  schooner 
With  news  from  the  far-off  realm  whence  we 
Set  sail  for  that  isle  of  mystery, 
Or  a  whisper  of  apology 

From  our  mute,  malign  marooner. 

The  strain  of  pessimism  in  this  is  even  more 
marked  than  in  Thompson's  "Anthem";  and  in- 
deed it  is  hard  to  deny  that  the  resolute  silence  of 
the  "Veiled  Being,"  the  "Invisible  King,"  and  all 
the  Gods  and  godlings  ever  propounded  to  mortal 
piety,  is  one  of  their  most  suspicious  character- 
istics. Yet  it  may  be  that  this  reproach,  however 
natural,  does  the  Veiled  Being — or  the  Younger 
Power  of  our  alternative  myth — a  measure  of  in- 
justice. It  may  be  that  the  great  Dramaturge 
keeps  his  plot  to  himself  precisely  in  order  that  the 
interest  may  be  maintained  up  to  the  fall  of  the 
curtain.  It  may  be  that  its  disclosure  would  upset 
the  conditions  of  some  vast  experiment  which  he 


126  GOD  AND  MR.  WELLS 

is  working  out.  Where  would  be  the  interest  of 
a  race  if  its  result  were  a  foregone  conclusion? 
Where  the  passion  of  a  battle  if  its  issue  were 
foreknown?  What  if  we  should  prove  to  be  som- 
nambulists treading  some  dizzy  edge  between  two 
abysses,  and  able  to  reach  the  goal  only  on  con- 
dition that  we  are  unconscious  of  the  process? 
Perhaps  the  sanest  view  of  the  problem  is  that  pre- 
sented in  Bliss  Carman's  haunting  poem 

THE  JUGGLER 

Look  how  he  throws  them  up  and  up, 
The  beautiful  golden   balls! 
They  hang  aloft  in  the  purple  air, 
And  there  never  is  one  that  falls. 

He  sends  them  hot  from  his  steady  hand, 
He  teaches  them  all  their  curves; 
And  whether  the  reach  be  little  or  long, 
There  never  is  one  that  swerves. 

Some,  like  the  tiny  red  one  there, 

He  never  lets  go  far; 

And  some  he  has  sent  to  the  roof  of  the  tent 

To  swim  without  a  jar. 

So  white  and  still  they  seem  to  hang, 
You  wonder  if  he  forgot 
To  reckon  the  time  of  their  return 
And  measure  their  golden  lot. 

Can  it  be  that,  hurried  or  tired  out, 
The  hand  of  the  juggler  shook? 


BACK  TO  THE  VEILED  BEING      127 

O  never  you  fear,  his  eye  is  clear, 
He  knows  them  all  like  a  book. 

And  they  will  home  to  his  hand  at  last, 
For  he  pulls  them  by  a  cord 
Finer  than  silk  and  strong  as  fate, 
That  is  just  the  bid  of  his  word. 

Was  ever  there  such  a  sight  in  the  world? 
Like  a  wonderful  winding  skein, — 
The  way  he  tangles  them  up  together 
And  ravels  them  out  again! 


If  I  could  have  him  at  the  inn 

All  by  myself  some  night, — 

Inquire  his   country,   and   where  in   the   world 

He  came  by  that  cunning  sleight! 

Where  do  you  guess  he  learned  the  trick 
To  hold  us  gaping  here, 

Till  our  minds  in  the  spell  of  his  maze  almost 
Have  forgotten  the  time  of  year? 

One  never  could  have  the  least  idea. 
Yet  why  he  disposed  to  twit 
A   fellow  who  does  such  wonderful  things 
With  the  merest  lack  of  wit? 

Likely  enough,  when  the  show  is  done 
And  the  balls  all  back  in  his  hand, 
He'll  tell  us  why  he  is  smiling  so, 
And  we  shall  understand. 

I  am  not,  perhaps,  very  firmly  assured  of  this 
consummation.     Yet   I   am   much   more   hopeful 


128  GOD  AND  MR.  WELLS 

of  one  day  understanding  the  Juggler  and  the  Balls 
than  of  ever  getting  into  confidential  relations  with 
Mr.  Wells's  Invisible  King. 


One  is  conscious  of  a  sort  of  churlishness  in  thus 
rejecting  the  advances  of  so  amiable  a  character 
as  the  Invisible  King.  But  is  Mr.  Wells,  on  his 
side,  quite  courteous,  or  even  quite  fair,  to  the 
Veiled  Being?  "Riddle  me  no  riddles!"  he 
seems  to  say;  "I  am  tired  of  your  guessing  games. 
Let  us  have  done  with  'distressful  enquiry  into 
ultimate  origins,'  and  'bring  our  minds  to  the 
conception  of  a  spontaneous  and  developing  God' 
— one  of  whose  existence  and  benevolence  we  are 
sure,  since  we  made  him  ourselves.  I  want  some- 
thing to  worship,  to  take  me  out  of  myself,  to 
inspire  me  with  brave  phrases  about  death.  How 
can  one  worship  an  insoluble  problem?  Will  an 
enigma  die  with  me  in  a  reeling  aeroplane?  While 
you  lurk  obstinately  behind  that  veil,  how  can  I 
even  know  that  your  political  views  are  sound? 
Whereas  the  Invisible  King  gives  forth  oracles  of 
the  highest  political  wisdom,  in  a  voice  which  I 
can  scarcely  distinguish  from  my  own.  You  are 
a  remote,  tantalizing  entity  with  nothing  comfort- 


BACK  TO  THE  VEILED  BEING      129 

ing  or  stimulating  about  you.  But  as  for  my  In- 
visible King,  'Closer  is  he  than  breathing,  and 
nearer  than  hands  and  feet.' ' 

A  little  way  back,  I  compared  Mr.  Wells  to 
Moses;  but,  looked  at  from  another  point  of  view, 
he  and  his  co-religionists  may  rather  be  likened 
to  the  Children  of  Israel.  Tired  of  waiting  for 
news  from  the  God  on  the  cloudy  mountain-top, 
did  they  not  make  themselves  a  synthetic  deity, 
finite,  friendly,  and  very  like  the  Invisible  King, 
inasmuch  as  he  seems  to  have  worked  no  miracles, 
and  done,  in  fact,  nothing  whatever?  But  the 
God  on  the  mountain-top  was  wroth,  and  accused 
them  of  idolatry,  surely  not  without  reason.  For 
what  is  idolatry  if  it  be  not  manufacturing  a  God, 
whether  out  of  golden  earrings  or  out  of  humani- 
tarian sentiments,  and  then  bowing  down  and  wor- 
shipping it? 

The  wrath  of  the  tribal  God  against  his  bovine 
rival  was  certainly  excessive — yet  we  cannot  regard 
idolatry  as  one  of  the  loftier  manifestations  of  the 
religious  spirit.  The  man  who  can  bow  down  and 
worship  the  work  of  his  hands  shows  a  morbid 
craving  for  self-abasement.  It  is  possible,  no 
doubt,  to  plead  that  the  graven  image  is  a  mere 
symbol  of  incorporeal,  supersensible  deity;  and  the 


130  GOD  AND  MR.  WELLS 

plea  is  a  good  one,  if,  and  in  so  far  as,  we  can 
believe  that  the  distinction  between  the  sign  and 
the  thing  signified  is  clear  to  the  mind  of  the 
devotee.  The  difficulty  lies  in  believing  that  the 
type  of  mind  which  is  capable  of  focussing  its  devo- 
tion upon  a  statuette  is  also  capable  of  dis- 
tinguishing between  the  idea  of  a  symbol  and  the 
idea  of  a  portrait.  But  when  we  pass  from  the 
work  of  a  man's  hands  to  the  work  of  his  brain 
— from  an  actual  piece  of  sculpture  to  a  mental 
construction — the  plea  of  symbolism  can  no  longer 
be  advanced.  This  graven  image  of  the  mind,  so 
to  speak,  is  the  veritable  God,  or  it  is  nothing; 
and  Mr.  Wells,  as  we  have  seen,  is  profuse  in  his 
assurances  that  it  is  the  veritable  God.  That  is 
what  makes  his  whole  attitude  and  argument  so 
baffling.  One  can  understand  an  idolater  who 
says  "I  believe  that  my  God  inhabits  yonder  im- 
age," or  "Yonder  image  is  only  a  convenient  point 
of  concentration  for  the  reverence,  gratitude,  and 
love  which  pass  through  it  to  the  august  and  trans- 
cendent Spirit  whom  it  symbolizes."  But  how  are 
we  to  understand  the  idolater  who  adores,  and 
claims  actual  divinity  for,  an  emanation  from  his 
own  brain  and  the  brains  of  a  certain  number  of 
like-minded  persons?  Is  it  not  as  though  a  ven- 


BACK  TO  THE  VEILED  BEING      131 

triloquist  were  to  prostrate  himself  before  his  own 
puppet? 

This  craving  for  something  to  worship  points  to 
an  almost  uncanny  recrudescence  of  the  spirit  of 
Asia  in  a  fine  European  intelligence.  For  my  own 
part,  as  above  stated,  I  cannot  believe  Mr.  Wells's 
case  to  be  typical;  but  in  that  I  may  be  mistaken. 
It  is  possible  that  an  epidemic  of  Asiatic  religiosity 
may  be  one  of  the  sequels  of  the  War.  If  that  be 
so — if  there  are  many  people  who  shrink  from  the 
condition  of  the  spiritual  "ronin,"  and  are  in  search 
of  a  respectable  "daimio"  to  whom  to  pay  their  de- 
votion— I  beg  leave  strongly  to  urge  the  claims  of 
the  Veiled  Being  as  against  the  Invisible  King. 

He  has  at  the  outset  the  not  inconsiderable  ad- 
vantage of  being  an  entity  instead  of  a  non-entity. 
Whoever  or  whatever  he  may  be,  we  are  compelled 
by  the  very  constitution  of  our  minds  to  assume  his 
(or  its)  existence;  whereas  there  is  manifestly  no 
compulsion  to  assume  the  existence  of  the  Invisible 
King. 

Then,  again,  the  Veiled  Being  is  entirely  unpre- 
tentious. There  is  no  bluster  and  no  cant  about 
him.  He  does  not  claim  our  gratitude  for  the 
doubtful  boon  of  life.  He  does  not  pretend  to  be 
just,  while  he  is  committing,  or  winking  at,  the 


132  GOD  AND  MR.  WELLS 

most  intolerable  injustices.  He  does  not  set  up  to 
be  long-suffering,  while  in  fact  he  is  childishly 
touchy.  He  does  not  profess  to  be  merciful,  while 
the  incurable  ward,  the  battlefield — nay,  even  the 
maternity  home  and  the  dentist's  parlor — are 
there  to  give  him  the  lie.  (Here,  of  course,  I  am 
not  contrasting  him  with  the  Invisible  King,  but 
with  more  ancient  and  still  more  Asian  divinities.) 
It  is  the  moral  pretensions  tagged  on  by  the  theolo- 
gians to  metaphysical  Godhead  that  revolt  and 
estrange  reasonable  men — Mr.  Wells  among  the 
rest.  If  you  tell  us  that  behind  the  Veil  we  shall 
find  a  good-natured,  indulgent  old  man,  who 
chastens  us  only  for  our  good,  is  pleased  by  our 
flatteries  (with  or  without  music),  and  is  not  more 
than  suitably  vexed  at  our  naughtinesses  in  the 
Garden  of  Eden  and  elsewhere — we  reply  that  this 
is  a  nursery  tale  which  has  been  riddled,  time  out 
of  mind,  not  by  wicked  sceptics,  but  by  the  spon- 
taneous, irrepressible  criticism  of  babes  and  suck- 
lings. But  if  you  divest  the  Veiled  Being  of  all 
ethical — or  in  other  words  of  all  human — attri- 
butes, then  there  is  no  difficulty  whatever  in  ad- 
miring, and  even  adoring,  the  marvels  he  has 
wrought.  Tennyson  went  deeper  than  he  realized 
into  the  nature  of  things  when  he  wrote — 


BACK  TO  THE  VEILED  BEING      133 

"For  merit  lives  from  man  to  man, 
But  not  from  man,  O  Lord,  to  thee." 

Once  put  aside  all  question  of  merit  and  demerit, 
of  praise  and  blame,  and  more  especially  (but  this 
will  shock  Mr.  Wells)  of  salvation  and  damnation 
— and  nothing  can  be  easier  than  to  pay  to  the 
works  of  the  Veiled  Being  the  meed  of  an  illimit- 
able wonder.  When  we  think  of  the  roaring  vor- 
tices of  flame  that  spangle  the  heavens  night  by 
night,  at  distances  that  beggar  conception:  when  we 
think  of  our  tiny  earth,  wrapped  in  its  little  film  of 
atmosphere,  spinning  safely  for  ages  untold  amid 
all  these  appalling  immensities:  and  when  we 
think,  on  the  other  hand,  of  the  battles  of  claw 
and  maw  going  on,  beneath  the  starry  vault,  in 
that  most  miraculous  of  jewels,  a  drop  of  water: 
we  cannot  but  own  that  the  Power  which  set  all 
this  whirl  of  atoms  agoing  is  worthy  of  all  admira- 
tion. And  approbation?  Ah,  that  is  another  mat- 
ter; for  there  the  moral  element  comes  in.  It  is 
possible  (and  here  lies  the  interest  of  the  enigma) 
that  the  Veiled  Being  may  one  day  justify  himself 
even  morally.  Perhaps  he  is  all  the  time  doing 
so  behind  the  veil.  But  on  that  it  is  absolutely 
useless  to  speculate.  Light  may  one  day  come  to 
us,  but  it  will  come  through  patient  investigation, 


134  GOD  AND  MR.  WELLS 

not  through  idle  pondering  and  guessing.  In  the 
meantime,  poised  between  the  macrocosm  and  the 
microcosm,  ourselves  including  both  extremes,  and 
being,  perhaps,  the  most  stupendous  miracle  of  all, 
we  cannot  deny  to  this  amazing  frame  of  things 
the  tribute  of  an  unutterable  awe.  If  that  be 
religion,  I  profess  myself  as  religious  as  Mr. 
Wells.  I  am  even  willing  to  join  him  in  some  out- 
ward, ceremonial  expression  of  that  sentiment,  if 
he  can  suggest  one  that  shall  not  be  ridiculously 
inadequate.  What  about  kneeling  through  the  C 
Minor  Symphony?  That  seems  to  me  about  as 
near  as  we  can  get.  Or  I  will  go  with  him  to  Prim- 
rose Hill  some  fine  morning  (like  the  Persian  Am- 
bassador fabled  by  Charles  Lamb)  and  worship 
the  Sun,  chanting  to  him  William  Watson's  magni- 
ficent hymn: — 

"To  thee  as  our  Father  we  bow, 
Forbidden  thy  Father  to  see, 
Who  is  older  and  greater  than  thou,  as  thou 
Art  greater  and  older  than  we." 

The  sun,  at  any  rate,  is  not  a  figure  of  speech, 
and  is  a  symbol  which  runs  no  risk  of  being  mis- 
taken for  a  portrait.  If  Mr.  Wells  would  be  con- 
tent with  some  such  "bright  sciential  idolatry," 
I  would  willingly  declare  myself  a  co-idolater. 


BACK  TO  THE  VEILED  BEING      135 

But  alas!  he  is  the  hierophant  of  the  Invisible  King, 
and  prayer  to  that  impotent  potentate  is  to  me 
a  moral  impossibility.  I  would  rather  face  dam- 
nation, especially  in  the  mild  form  threatened  by 
Mr.  Wells,  which  consists  (pp.  148-149)  in  not 
knowing  that  you  are  damned. 

And  if  Mr.  Wells  maintains  that  in  the  worship 
of  the  non-moral  Veiled  Being  there  is  no  practical, 
pragmatic  comfort,  I  reply  that  I  am  not  so  sure 
of  that.  When  all  is  said  and  done,  is  there  not 
more  hope,  more  solace,  in  an  enigma  than  in  a 
facon  de  parler?  I  should  be  quite  willing  to  ac- 
cept the  test  of  the  reeling  aeroplane.  The  aviator 
can  say  to  his  soul:  "Here  am  I,  one  of  the  most 
amazing  births  of  time,  the  culmination  of  an  end- 
less series  of  miracles.  Perhaps  I  am  on  the  verge 
of  extinction — if  so,  what  does  it  all  matter?  But 
perhaps,  on  the  contrary,  I  am  about  to  plunge  into 
some  new  adventure,  as  marvellous  as  this.  More 
marvellous  it  cannot  be,  but  it  may  perhaps  be  more 
agreeable.  At  all  events,  there  is  something  fasci- 
nating in  this  leap  in  the  dark.  Good  bye,  my 
soul!  Good-bye,  my  memory! 

'If  we  should  meet  again,  why,  we  shall  smile; 
If  not,  why  then  this  parting  was  well  made.' " 


136  GOD  AND  MR.  WELLS 

I  cannot  but  think  that  there  is  as  much  religion 
and  as  much  solace  in  such  a  shaking-off  of  "the 
hur  o'  the  world"  as  in  the  thought  that  the  last 
new  patent  God  is  going  to  die  with  you,  and  that 
you,  unconsciously  and  indistinguishably  merged  in 
him,  are  going  to  live  for  ever. 


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